We had several updates for you, primarily in the realm of getting bigger boxes for everything from game recap, boxscore and photo processing, to updating our database servers to make them distributed.

The detailed breakdown.

Epic

• Our NCAA basketball scoreboard page occasionally was overwhelmed when some 150 took place on a single day. We refactored that page to make it more robust and stable.
• Gaming was moved over to our message-queue so that your game results will arrive in a more timely fashion on both Facebook and on FanFeedr.com
• We added in MLB and College Basketball into Facebook Pick’Em, just in time for March Madness

Bugs

• Removed tweets from the Chrome application
• Gaming updates sent via email now have the up-to-date player rank
• Amended photo publishing to Facebook and Twitter to provide more value by actually publishing photos

That’s it. The current sprint is all about bug fixes, so we will have more for you next week.

Thanks, as always, FanFeedr

Gaming

• Relaunch of FanFeedr Pick’Em on Facebook
• Better badges
• Faster response time
• Revamped User Experience
• If you . . .
  • like to show off, and
  • have a mild inclination for betting,
  • then this game is for you

FanFeedr Chrome Application

• The Chrome App store launched on Feb. 1st
• We made several changes to improve your user experience, based on your feedback
  • Box scores open directly in the interface
  • Photos open directly in the interface
  • Recaps open directly in the interface
  • Made it easier to get to your fanned items

Twitter

• We put tighter restrictions on what gets published to Twitter so that you get more value, less noise, for each of the team and player accounts.

Celery

• More than just a good source of fiber
• It is a “Celery is an asynchronous task queue/job queue based on distributed message passing. It is focused on real-time operation, but supports scheduling as well.”
• Allows for a more stable FanFeedr so that you will see even better uptime

Minor bugs

• We had both “Yahoo” and “Yahoo Sports” listed. There is now just “Yahoo Sports.”

Thanks again, and we hope you try out the new stuff, FanFeedr

First the really good news: we hit over 160,000 Twitter followers across our accounts last month. Yay for us!

For the following site upgrades, most are technology fixes and upgrades, so you are duly forewarned.

• We paginated our Leaderboard, so the pages loads faster and you can do a deeper dive on your favorite sports
• We are now aggregating all of the player and team tweets from Major League Soccer, as you can see here via our list of MLS Tweets
• Fixed a weird glitch with SIU Edwardsville Cougars’s basketball schedule, because we were besieged with requests and prioritized it
• We added monitoring to all of our server processes to ensure better uptime
• We upgraded SQL Alchemy and Mako to versions 0.6.5 and 0.3.6 respectively
• We are publishing some additional material directly out of Solr
• We upgraded and fixed a number of FanFeedr API calls, which are noted in detail on the developer portal

More good stuff in the pipeline, and thank you, as always for using the service.

Thanks, FanFeedr

Have a great holiday season, FanFeedr

Over the last two weeks, we have had a slate of good news:

• FanFeedr was selected as one of the PepsiCo10 top emerging startups
• We launched our FanFeedr Pick’Em game directly on Facebook
• We released our Official Redskins Feedr application in partnership with the Washington Redskins
• Verizon is actively promoting our FanFeedr Android application for personalized sports news and information

Additionally, the developers have worked hard (and over weekends) to improve the user experience on FanFeedr, Facebook and Twitter for you, our users.

Improvements to FanFeedr.com

• The Associated Press accidentally cut off our photo feed, and that has been restored. Top photos on the site in the last hour are here.
• European football and US football scores, schedules and rosters have been updated
• We made it easier to login and sign-up for the site by creating a new first-time user experience
• We added navigation to the sports in the search bar at the top of every page to make it easier to go to scores, photos and the Hot News

On our Facebook Pick’Em application

• We made it easier and clearer to invite friends to the game
• Fixed some bugs when we published the results of scores
• Added in options with our partner, gWallet, to allow you to get points for free

As always, we appreciate your business, and your feedback, and please let us know if you are missing anything important in the FanFeedr Feedback area.

Thanks, FanFeedr

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

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

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

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

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