FanFeedr News launched back early December to become a spoke to the FanFeedr hub. Site goals were set to be the news outlet reporting breaking news and to drive traffic back to the main site. The staff consisted of three writers posting game previews, recaps, league power rankings and top stories across the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL & European soccer.

For the month of December, traffic was modest at best due to limited resources and bandwidth.

During the month of January, FanFeedr News decided to bring on 20 team columnists across the four major sports, college basketball and soccer. The columnists covered the games of their assigned teams by writing previews, recaps and features. Fresh content was constantly posted increasing the reach of FanFeedr. However, this was more of a case of a higher quantity than overall quality. The content from the site did not really stand out and got lost in the weeds.

Greg Schneider, FanFeedr community manager, proposed a different approach for FanFeedr News to shake things up. The focus of FanFeedr News should be more timely and more aware of the hottest sports stories a la Deadspin. A team of three writers (Joe Gill, Shlomo Sprung & Paul Farrell) would now generate content based on NFL Head Coaching moves, European Soccer Transfer News, power rankings across all sports & buzz worthy stories.  The rest of the staff would continue with their quality team coverage as before.

The experiment has been a resounding success. As the New Approach Snap Shot illustrates below, the site experienced dramatic traffic growth. The staff is extremely excited about this outcome.

NEW APPROACH SNAP SHOT

Below is a traffic comparison before (Jan. 6-15) & after (Jan.16-25) new approach:

• Visits increased 110%
• Unique visitors increased 123%
• Page views increased 86%

MONTH BY MONTH SUMMARY

Below is a January (based on 25 days) vs. December (based on 31 days) traffic comparison:

• Visits increased 135%
• Unique visitors increased 119%
• Page Views increased 126%

With this new found success and re-positioning, FanFeedr News has been re-branded FanFeedr Hot Takes. FanFeedr Hot Takes strives to be the one stop shop for team news and buzz worthy content.

It is our goal for FanFeedr.com to be as stable and usable as possible.  With that goal in mind, we will be scheduling roughly an hour of down time next week to make improvements to our servers that will result in the site being unavailable.

We will know the exact time frame early next week.  We apologize in advance for the inconvenience.

Follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook for the latest updates.

- The FanFeedr Team

UPDATE: The downtime is scheduled for this afternoon and will occur for about 90 minutes.  Thank you for your patience.

-The FanFeedr Team

Today we are excited to announce the release of the next version of the FanFeedr API.

Highlights of this release:

• Performance Improvements
• Related Entities
• Live Scores
• Standings
• Game Details
• Hot Info
• Local Data
• Updated Documentation

Getting Started

API v1 documentation has been uploaded to the developer portal. The URL structure for the v1 release will require changing API calls to include v1/ prior to the query string, e.g. http://api.fanfeedr.com/basic/v1/resource_feed/mlb/ny-yankees/?appid={AppID}

We will continue to support the original version of our API, but will not be adding additional features to that version. Therefore, we encourage you to migrate over to the new version of our API.

Performance Improvements

• Standardized call formatting and responses
• Additional output formats, including HTML and RSS
• Improved performance of API calls via fine tuning of application code
• Appended additional information to the datasets returned with the resource_feed. The resource_feed now shows you what entities are tagged in an article. Users can specify a particular resource and parse out the results in a more fine grained manner according to what’s in the article.

Related Entities

This call returns related entities mapping as follows:

League -> conferences, divisions, teams

Conference -> divisions, teams

Division -> teams

Teams -> players

Live Scores

By popular demand, in game scores. Supports multiple resources.

Standings

Returns standings for leagues, conferences, divisions, or teams.

Game Details

game_details – extended information for a particular game including live progress, events, and FeedItems about the game.

games_on_date – for any given date, get a list of all games.

latest_game – the latest game for a team, league, list of teams, or list of leagues.

Hot_

hot_topics – returns a list of the hottest teams and players over the past hour, each with the hottest article related to that team or player.

hot_blogs – returns a list of the hottest blogs over the past hour, each with the hottest article published by that blog.

Local_

local_teams – provides a list of professional and college teams within a radius around a given latitude/longitude.

local_news – shortcut to the resource feed for all teams returned by local_teams call.

local_ scoreboard – shortcut for getting the latest events for all teams returned by local_teams call.

Updated Documentation

In response to comments from developers, we have updated and reorganized our documentation. We will be adding call results examples shortly. We plan to add client libraries in the next couple of weeks.

We welcome any additional comments you have regarding the documentation currently listed on the developer portal.

The FanFeedr API Team

Special thanks to our engineers Doug Tabuchi, Andy Adams, and Chris Sabanty for their contributions to this release.

API Roadmap

We are already planning for our next release and evaluating potential new features. If you have an idea for a new feature, please submit a post in the forums under Feature Requests. We will keep you updated on development news through our Announcements forum thread, blog posts, email, and Twitter.

We appreciate the feedback that we’ve received from our developer ecosystem and look forward to supporting your projects. Fostering a rich development community is a key priority for our company, and we have several initiatives planned over the next few months to strengthen our relationship. Over 325 developers have registered API keys, and we will strive to provide you with the most robust set of tools and resources for your projects.

If you have any questions or comments about the API v1 release or any other matter, please contact me directly at benn@fanfeedr.com. Again, thank you for being part of the FanFeedr community, and we look forward to continued collaboration.

Happy coding,

Benn, on behalf of the FanFeedr API Team

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.