Not too hot, not too cold

It’s clear from our traffic that users like pictures, so this release we’ve added slide shows. Whenever you filter content by photos, you now have the option to scroll through the collection images using arrows.

We’ve also updated our algorithm for publishing into Facebook and Twitter. We now publish the hottest content for a given team. And we do it a little less often. So instead of some teams getting too much content and some teams not getting any content at all, all teams should get a nice steady flow of content.

Finally, as with every release we’ve fixed a ton of little bugs and made minor tweaks throughout the site.

Make a beautiful noise

Just in time for the final matches of the World Cup, we’ve seriously upgraded our soccer, I mean our football offering. We now have full rosters and schedules with box scores and recaps. This is true for all of football, so click around and enjoy.

We have also added Getty images to our Developer API. Getty provides high-quality images, and we provide an easy interface to customize the images you receive. You can refine what you receive by team, player, or any other search criteria already supported on the site.

Finally, we are now using Facebook Single Sign-On, rather than Facebook Connect to authenticate you on our site. This should make for a much smoother and seamless experience.

Faster, stronger

The World Cup has been a blessing and a curse. We’re getting a ton of traffic, but that has forced us to deal with some stability issues. Accordingly, our latest release had an important optimization. Box scores are now being written out directly to HTML, skipping an intermediate translation step. This will speed up our site as well as protect us from future switches between data providers. We also further partitioned our application to make it more scalable. This allowed us to add new hardware to better handle the load.

As we’ve already mentioned before on the blog and in this post, the World Cup is a Real Big Deal right now. To make for an even better FanFeedr experience, we added a slew of new hash tags to our Twitter queries to ensure you are getting relevant, real-time content. We also added new World Cup Challenge game. Check it out here.

Less visibly, we laid the foundation to cut over to the new authentication schemes Facebook and Twitter are rolling out. And as usual, a ton of bugs were fixed.

R59: Spring has sprung, and bagful of goodies

You don’t need a lengthy intro, here’s the good stuff:

• If you win a badge, we will tell you why. That means, if you become a Scout in a league, you will know the winning game that got you there.
• If you are second in the gaming standings, you will see how many wins you need before you can overtake the Commissioner in each league.
• Get your tickets: team pages now feature the cheapest seats for actual games in your actual city, via our friends in the seats business, SeatGeek.
• New custom short domains, courtesy of our friends at Bitly, so that you know a FanFeedr link when you see one. It will look like this: “http://ffd.me/a90aqY”
• Random bug fixes to make your life easier

As always, we hope you have a great weekend, and we thank you for your patronage/usage/site involvement.

Your friends at the Feedr of the Fans.

R57 varieties of improvement

OK, maybe that’s a bit of an overstatement. Still, this week’s release offers improvements in a number of areas:

• Better communication on commissioner badge takeaways. On those momentous occasions when you or one of the FanFeedr users you follow happens to grab the commissioner badge for a league, the loser now receives his or her very own public announcement of the event. Think of it as a consolation prize.
• Game activities on Twitter. Game picks, results and badge awards are now published to your Twitter stream (assuming you’ve given us your Twitter credentials) on the same schedule as they’re published to your Facebook feed (that is to say, on a very polite basis).
• Improved Twitter authentication. Registering with us via Twitter is now more reliable.
• Improved metro area pages. We thought we’d spiffy up our localized pages a bit, with a nicer scoreboard and a hot topics section that’s truly local.

Check back next week for the next round of improvements, in the form of a new, cleaner layout and some overall performance enhancements. And as always, we welcome your cards and letters, especially when they’re sent to us via the Feedback panel located on the left-hand side of every FanFeedr page.

Until next time, we remain

Your friends at FanFeedr

R55: Location, all you ever wanted

A principal feature of FanFeedr is to provide a localized subset of news, photos and scores to unregistered users, based on our best guess at their present location (sometimes this involves a cork bobbing in a bowl of water with a magnetized needle through it, but not always). But what if you want news about local teams in Boston or Seattle while you’re vacationing in Detroit?* This week’s release allows you do to just that — we’re introducing local pages for metro areas around the country. Here’s the deets (and some info on other goodies):

• New pages for metro areas
  • Get content on local colleges, teams and players
  • Also available as widgets or via the API
  • At-a-glance navigation for local teams
• Improved navigation for F1 and NASCAR. Now you can find your favorite F1 and NASCAR teams more quickly and easily.
• Improved support for IE8. The neverending story continues.

Also, as noted previously, we’ve recently released version 1.4 of our iPhone app, and our crack Mobile Platforms Development team is hard at work on the upcoming iPad version. And, as always, we eagerly solicit your feedback using the red Feedback button on the left hand side of every page.

Until next time, then, we remain

Your friends at FanFeedr.

*Work with us here, people. Don’t hate on the Motor City.

Version 1.4 of our iPhone App is here

Get v.1.4 here

The latest FanFeedr iPhone app is live on the iTunes App Store and available now as a free download.

What’s New

1. You can now play the FanFeedr “You Pick’em” game from your phone. Correctly pick the winning team for upcoming games and earn points and badges.
2. Added hot stories for IRL.
3. Hot stories are now limited to the hottest stories in the last hour under ‘All’ and the last day under each league.
4. Bug fixes.

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

Thanks, FanFeedr.

R54, for even the wackiest brackets

• NCAA Tournament
  • New badges. We’ve created special badges for Round of 32, Sweet 16, Elite 8, Final Four and Championship game winners.
  • Online video links. We’ve provided integration with CBS March Madness on Demand Internet video on scoreboard and team pages, so it’s even easier to keep track of the action.
• Pick ’Em refinements
  • Game opportunities on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribers of our Facebook news pages and Twitter feeds now receive game opportunities in their feeds, so they won’t miss a chance to bet on their favorite teams.
  • Picks now appear on all games. Now it’s dead simple to keep track of your Pick ’Em record: just look up the games from last night (or the night before) and witness the fruits of your labor against the game results.
• Plus: new Facebook pages for F1 and NASCAR racing teams, RSS feeds for local area teams, and more.
• Last but not least: RSS for the home page. You can now get your personalized FanFeed delivered to your feed-reader of choice.

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