Better insights and Football/Soccer

Recap of the features in this week’s release:

• We have access to a bigger slice of Twitter, so the “Hot Topics’ module on the home page is now even more accurate (though Liverpool fans still talk about their team quite a bit)
• We have decided to suppress tweets in our mobile applications after you folks asked us to do so
• Minor bug fixes

As always, thanks, FanFeedr

R66: Getty Images and World Cup Soccer

We have a lot in this week’s release.

World Cup Soccer

• The main World Cup page is here
• Follow all of the teams on FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter.
• The USA team can be followed via FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter

We also have a pretty sweet World Cup Challenge game on Facebook. Pick your favorite teams and compete with your friends in the Tournament.

Getty Images

• We have a partnership to Getty Images for their amazing sports photos, which are now live on the site.
• Here is a great example of Pau Gasol
• We are also adding some functionality if you would like to show Getty Images on your site. We will let you know when that is available.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

R62: Control your destiny

Release 62 is all about giving you more control over what publishes to Facebook and Twitter from FanFeedr, and how frequently.

• With that in mind, we have a new pop-up panel that controls what gets pushed out to both sites. We also made it so that you can get notified whenever you have a new follower. We won’t ever send you mails without your ability to control them. The controls can be accessed via your profile page account settings, and it looks like this:

• Tweet limiting: on the homepage, you can hide tweets from your FanFeed (on the right of the column) if you don’t want to see them:
  
• We updated our press section with the latest articles about FanFeedr
• Our scoreboards now show the teams that you have picked:
  
• We fixed a bug for Safari users on our sports application for the Apple iPad that allowed for our share bar to float. You can now browse FanFeedr on your iPad without any display oddities.
• Additionally, if you are not logged into the site, you can see the FanFeedr Public Timeline without having to login.

As always, thanks for your support, and let us know if we missed anything right here.

Feedr of the Fans

R56: We heard your plaintitive cries for de-duplication

and they have been answered. No longer will you get all 54 versions of AP stories on Matt Holliday’s latest bon mot. We have smartly figured out how to stop that scourge of duplication, the wire story, from showing up all over the place.

The highlights from this week’s release:

• Fixed the leaderboard so that we only show in-season sports. You can pick the Final Four teams here, by the way.
• Twitter
  • You can choose whether we publish your game wins to Twitter, and how frequently
  • Your badges will get published to Twitter as well
• The Formula 1 Times is back up, as we have their new RSS feed
• You can find metropolitan areas like Bay Area and Chicago just by typing them in the search bar. This allows you to follow all of the teams in a city in one fell swoop.
• We have re-ordered your badge placement on your profile page so that the most important badges are on the top of your other, somewhat less important badges
• Usual stomping of the bugs

We hope that you are looking forward to the start of baseball this Sunday as much as we are, and don’t forget that the Pick’Em game works pretty nicely for  MLB as well.

Let us not forget: our iPad application is available RIGHT now, for those of you who want the best sports application on the iPad, with the usual personalized FanFeedr goodness.

Thanks, Feedr of the Fans

R53: Laying the table for March Tournament Pick’Em

Straight to the goodies.

More real-time goodness

• We are publishing in real time to Facebook through the API, so no more of that RSS lateness
• Facebook team pages also get scores, photos, and videos, so that you don’t have to go elsewhere to get everything about your favorite teams
• We are now publishing our RSS feeds via Pubsubhubbub, which means you can get them completely in real-time, with no latency
• Scores and photos are have also been included in the RSS feeds on FanFeedr.com.

Pick’Em enhancements

• We are now publishing the opportunity to pick your favorite NBA and NHL games directly to our Twitter and Facebook feeds so that you don’t have to come searching to bet.
• We reduced the number of times that Pick’Em picks publish to your Facebook feed. You will only see them once a day at the very most so that we don’t overwhelm your posts.
• We also reduced the publishing of picks on FanFeedr to just the first pick you make each day so that you can see everyone in the Public Timeline, and, more importantly, so that your own feed isn’t overwhelmed.
• On Monday, you can pick the NCAA tournament, and we have special badges for each bracket
  

Racing improvements

NASCAR

• We now have individual pages for each of the NASCAR teams, like Penske
• We also have Twitter accounts for Penske and others

Formula 1

• We now have individual pages for each of the Formula 1 teams, like Ferrari and BMW Sauber
• We also have Twitter accounts for Ferrari and Mercedes

Technical stuff

• Fixed a bug whereby posts to Facebook didn’t work properly

We hope that you enjoy the tournaments this weekend, and look forward to checking out your Picks in a couple of days, FanFeedr

R52: One year anniversary edition, now with Twitter Authentication

Hello and good morning/afternoon/evening.

This week we enabled the ability to sign up using Twitter as well as Facebook, so if you would like to use those credentials as the primary way you login to the site, no problem. You can also post material to and from Facebook, but you will be known on the service primarily by your Twitter handle.

You can try it out by going to the homepage and logging in with Twitter. If you already have an account with us, you can add your twitter credentials whenever you make a comment and post to twitter or if you share via Twitter.

Facebook

You can follow your favorite teams on Facebook now, and that functionality is exposed on the team pages (in the left column, the blue button.)

Some examples of team pages on Facebook:

• Soccer-Arsenal
• College Basketball-Kentucky Wildcats
• NFL-New Orleans Saints
• MLB-Yankees and Red Sox
• NBA-Lakers

These feeds publish headlines, scores, boxscores, photos and other updates directly on Facebook.

Pick’Em Game

• We fixed the badging so that there is only one Commissioner, and so that Newbies show up in the right place

Content

• We added the mildly unintentionally funny Ozzie Guillen’s twitter feed for your consumption
• You can also get Bill Simmons, the Sports Guy
• And Deadspin, so that you don’t have to go hunting for your favorite sports writers
• Baseball schedules for 2010 are up on the team pages for MLB

UX

• We reformatted the team and player pages so that they look good (that is, not like a ransom note) in Internet Explorer 7 and 8, which are super finicky about style sheets
• Roster pages have been cleaned up to look like our super fresh schedule pages

And we are up to 7,000 content sources, including all of the material submitted in the past month.

Thanks for your support, and let us know if we are missing anything, here.

FanFeedr

Release 49: Blackberry, Android, Palm and Windows Mobile users get in the action

There are three themes for this week’s release.

Mobile

• We have made it so that our links work on mobile devices. If you want to follow your favorite teams on your Blackberry, Android, Palm or Windows Mobile device, just add follow the team on Twitter.
• You can find your teams’ Twitter account by going to the team page, like this one, and clicking on “Follow on Twitter.”

Gaming

• New and better badges, you can see them on the Leaderboard.
• We added a FanFeedr Pick’Em page that allows you to pick all of the games on a given day. You can access this from any page on the service using the “FanFeedr Pick’Em” link above the search bar.
• Adding a user’s winning percentage after their picks on the Leaderboard, so you can see who is a “volume” winner and who is picking accurately
• Reduced posting a user’s picks to Facebook and the service so that you don’t get overwhelmed with updates (and neither do your friends.)

Service

• Revamped our schedules pages so that you can see upcoming games and refer to past games as well, easily.
• Fixed sharing by email so that the links work properly
• We are up to 6,500 content sources for your reading pleasure

As always, thanks for all of your support, and please tell your sports-enthused friends to try out the service, Feedr of the Fans

The mid-Winter goodness of release 46

We have completed work on a bunch of material, in order:

• Added ability to make API queries based on location (e.g. give me all of the news and information for San Francisco)
• Twitter accounts for the entire Premier League (even Liverpool)
• We have 6,081 content sources, thanks to our man Greg Schneider

FanPick updates

• We are showing a running tally of wins and losses in FanPicks on your profile page
• Bug fixes to the FanPicks game
• Your FanPick items now publish to Facebook so your friends can join you (you can shut it off by deleting it from your Facebook profile)
• Top fans in the NFL, NBA and other sports are ranked by their ability to predict games using FanPick
• We have a Leaderboard for all of you prognosticators

Next week we will have more gaming improvements.

Have a great weekend, FanFeedr

Release 40 is up and full of holiday cheer

Not really, but we cynically know that holiday headlines get more page-rank juice in December.

The formal proceedings:

• Schedules constrained to one season.
• Basketball box score cleanup (no more leading “S’s”, whatever those were about.)
• Better recap links (specific to team, conference, league)
• Improved soccer names in scoreboard (the German teams were killing us.)
• Conference-specific standings and scoreboard
• Fixed AJAX update for social gestures (removed dupes)
• Added tennis/golf players to our Hot Topics
• We have over 5,200 sources, including Huffington Post sports.
• Fixed recap tweets formatting in Twitter

We hope you are having a good December and we will have more at the end of the week.

Thanks, Feedr of Fans

Version 36 is up with push alerts on the iPhone and more

Right to it . . .

Push notifications on the iPhone

• All iPhone users with version 1.0 of the application will now get scores sent to them when games are in progress, based on their FanFeed.

Better experience for first time users

• New first time user experience (FTUE) that has yellow boxes that shows new users exactly what they have to do to get a personalized FanFeed.
• To see this go to the site . . .

1. Log out if you are already logged in
2. Refresh the page
3. This only works on Safari, Firefox and Chrome
4. It doesn’t work on IE 6, 7, or 8.

Also . . .

• Scoreboards for all of the other games on each boxscore page, like the Lakers beat down of the Suns, last night, for example.
• Twitter feeds, like the one for my beloved Warriors, are powered directly off of our website, for reduced latency and real-time scores

More to come next week, and let us know what you think.

Thanks, the Feedr of the Fans