FanFeedr is looking for a few rockstar Python people (or people who want to learn Python)

FanFeedr is hiring, and we would love to hear from folks in your network who have any of the following skill sets. Please have them contact us on jobs@fanfeedr.com.

We are based in New York and San Francisco, and we are looking for smart folks.

Open positions

Lead Engineer

• Responsible for applying a Bayesian categorizer and organizer to new content verticals.

Engineer

• Responsible for maintaining our RESTful API, developer evangelism, product development, and web client development.

Front-end developer

• Responsible for front-end web development across multiple platforms

SysAdmin

• Responsible for maintaining our AWS web services based backend. This is not necessarily a full-time position.

Company background
FanFeedr is a real-time media aggregation platform that delivers personalized news streams, social gestures, real-time trends and conversations around users’ passions. We are focused on sports, and you can see and use the application here, view our API or download our iPhone application. More company background is here.

Technical background
We’re using a nearly full-Python technology stack on top of the PostgreSQL RDBMS. SQLAlchemy is our database ORM; Pylons is our web application framework, and Mako templates provide our view layer. We also use SOLR for content indexing and retrieval. Our infrastructure is hosted in the cloud using Amazon EC2, Elastic Block and S3.

Again, you can contact us about any of these positions via jobs@fanfeedr.com.

Thanks, Ty

R50 tightens the competition

Ah, the big five-O. It’s an important milestone — frankly, there are too many candles to fit on one cake. For us, it means just about a year’s worth of weekly releases. Of course, our initial releases were internal to the FanFeedr team, but even so, the next release will mark the one-year anniversary of our development efforts.

After a month of heated FanFeedr Pick ’Em competition, we’re rolling out some changes this week that will make gameplay even more competitive:

• Revamped game badges
  • New badge goals for better competition across leagues. Our original rules awarded badges for the same number of wins no matter what the league, which meant that NCAA leaders were well ahead of their counterparts in the professional leagues (since the NCAA has more games, thus more opportunities to win). Our new rules level the playing field (no pun intended), making badge awards more consistent based on the number of games in each league.
  • A new badge level. Since it will take more competition to get badges in some leagues, we’re adding a Coach badge between Scout and Manager to recognize newer players.
  • Pick prices also reflect the number of games. We’ve also changed the points required to make picks, so it won’t cost any more points to be competitive in NCAA Basketball than in the NFL.
  • Better Facebook updates. Pick ’Em posts to your Facebook profile have more information, and arrive more consistently, showing your Facebook friends just how smart you are.
  • Badges for picking special events. We’ve also introduced new badges for the Super Bowl and NBA All-Star game, with more to come.
• Team logos for boxscores and Facebook posts
  • All professional teams for football, baseball, basketball and hockey, and most (if not all) for soccer.
  • Major colleges and universities, with more added all the time
• Usual additions to content sources and sports coverage, with Winter Olympics news supplied by the AP.

As usual, we have more improvements in store across the board, so please stay tuned for news about new game features, improved Twitter integration, additions to our iPhone app, and other goodies.

Until then, we thank you for your support.

Your friends at FanFeedr

R45 jets into the new year

Twenty-ten, people! Who’d've ever believed it? 2010 sounds conspicuously like the future, but seems conspicuously like the present.

Well, we may not be able to give you flying cars, but R45 is this week’s jetpack:

• Refinements to the fabulous FanFeedr game picks and badges:
  • Posting game picks to Facebook*
  • A welcoming “newbie” badge for your first successful pick. Don’t you feel special?
  • Support for ties in soccer (or draws, if you want to be all proper about it).
  • Badges on your profile page. Now your friends can know how smart you are too.
• Top fans ranked by gaming results. You can now officially be the top fan of top fans.
• And of course, our usual various and sundry improvements:
  • Additional content sources and new teams
  • More Twitter feeds for NASCAR, F1, boxing/MMA

*If you’ve given us permission to post to your Wall, of course.

That’s all for this week, but please join us next week for more exciting FanFeedr features on FanFeedr Feature Friday. And you’ll also get a badge for saying that five times fast.

We thank you for your support,

The FanFeedr Team

Holiday wishes

Here at FanFeedr Global HQ, in the heart of the area known as Dumbo (Down underneath Manhattan Bridge Overpass), we would like to wish you and your families’ a very happy holiday season and we hope you enjoy what we have built so far.

We have much more coming for you, based on your feedback, in the next year.

Warmest regards, the FanFeedr team

PS Click here to go back to the site.

Version 1.1 of our iPhone App is Live.

Get v.1.1 here

Version 1.1 of the FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

1. Instapaper support. Save your stories for offline reading with the ‘Read later with Instapaper’ button under the share icon in the bottom left of the article screen. (Requires a free Instapaper account).
2. Bug fixes. Using Apple’s new bug reporting feature, we were able to identify and fix some problems that we didn’t catch during testing.
3. UI refinements. Slight changes have been made to the interface to keep things looking slick.

Thank you for your interest in the FanFeedr iPhone and iPod Touch application.

Thanks, FanFeedr.

This is something that we try to live by

Retaining users as well as growing the users we have.

Version 35 of the site is live (and why you should care)

Goodies this week for the Web site.

• Better hotness on the home page in the upper right (more revisions over next two weeks)
• Tighter binding of the “Why?” stories to the category
• Added a time stamp so that you can see when the hotness was last updated on home page
• Added “Fantasy Sports” as a category on the bottom of every page

And we have other goodness for the iPhone. Get v.0.9.6 here.

Version 0.9.6 of the FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

That’s it!

Thanks, the FanFeedr-people.

R34 arrives hot from the oven

One of the central design goals of FanFeedr to help people find sports content that’s not just new but interesting — in short, surfacing whatever stories attract the most attention. So it’s not unusual here at Global HQ to hear us to discuss our internal attention metric (what we call “hotness”) as we tune it to capture the likes and dislikes of FanFeedr Nation. This week our discussions have finally borne fruit:

• We rolled out a new algorithm for hotness, together with a new homepage widget that shows the topics people care most about, and the story that makes each topic so popular
• We’ve added over 4500 new content sources (a new record, thanks to our dedicated interns), so we can now say that we’ve clarified on Cleveland State, banged it out for Boise State, and fired it up for Fresno State. Yeah, I said it.
• Also available this week is an update to the FanFeedr iPhone app (thanks to the steady hand on the wheel of Sangraal Aiken, our iPhone maven), that provides major improvements to performance and display and better behavior in landscape mode
• And we tuned our greeting for first-time users joining us from social networks to be more elegant and refined. Just like us.

It’s a big sports weekend here in the Big Apple, so that’s all for this week. Tune in next time when we discuss R35, next week’s release. And as always we thank you for your support.

Cheers,

Your friends at FanFeedr.

R33 puts the Feedr in Fantasy Football

This week I’d like to announce something we’ve been working on for a while here at FanFeedr Labs. No, I don’t mean our secret campaign to defeat the annoying robot on Fox NFL Sunday (although our plans there are nearly in place). I mean support for Fantasy Football! Here’s how it works:

• Associate your Yahoo! teams with your FanFeedr account from the settings page
• Track multiple teams in multiple leagues in one step — once you associate your Yahoo account with your FanFeed, all of your teams and activities are available
• Activities include transactions (drops and adds), wins and losses
• Additionally, after each game day you’ll see how your team is progressing against others in your league
• It’s Yahoo! only for now, but we’re looking to extend support to other providers

None of this would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of Doug Tabuchi, our West Coast operative. So when you get that last bit of information in your FanFeed informing you that you’ve been beat down by your bitterest rivals, think of Doug and smile.

Until next time,
Your friends at FanFeedr

R32 is up, up and away

This week gives us a relatively slight update in the wake of the iPhone app’s release (and kudos to Sangraal for his excellent work).

• Cosmetic fixes in various places, including scoreboards, feed items, et al.
• In-game scoring updates for hockey and soccer.
• Speed improvements. Someone found a dial that went to 11, so we turned it.
• As usual, more content, more Twitter feeds, and more photos.

We’re also in the final stages of a major new feature that we hope to unveil next week. I don’t want to spoil the surprise, but suffice it to say that fantasy team owners will be pleased.

Speaking of being pleased, I note with interest that the Giants are playing the Raiders this weekend. I’ll have to work on my smug look for Monday.

Keep those cards and letters coming, and be well until next time.

Your friends at FanFeedr.