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

Open positions

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

MEDIA CONTACT

Amy Bonetti
Big Mouth Communications
415-384-0900
amy@bigmouthpr.com

Throw Away the Traditional Office Pool Bracket—FanFeedr’s March Madness Pick’Em is Here!

The First Sports Social Game Seamlessly Integrated with Facebook and Twitter

NYC — MARCH 9, 2010 – The excitement is building for college basketball fans as March Madness is upon us — many teams are on the bubble as they compete to be included in the field of 65 for the 72^nd NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship Tournament. More than any other sporting event, March Madness attracts not only the avid sports fan, but casual sports fans and others who may not be sports fans at all.

And today, FanFeedr personalized sports fix announces March Madness Pick’Em, the first sports social game that is seamlessly integrated with Facebook and Twitter, enabling users to easily share their trash talking and claim bragging rights of their winning team selections and Pick’Em badging status with their friends and co-workers. FanFeedr’s March Madness Pick’Em is a great replacement or complement to the various traditional March Madness bracket office pools.

FanFeedr’s Pick’Em sports social gaming platform builds upon the rapidly growing social gaming economy pioneered by Zynga, Playfish and several others that is predicted to hit $1B in 2010. “FanFeedr’s Pick’Em gaming economy allows sports fans around the world to show their sports-savviness to their friends and all other users,” says FanFeedr’s CEO and founder, Ty Ahmad-Taylor.

FanFeedr users who join in the March Madness Pick’Em gaming action will be challenged to choose the winners of the 63 total games from the opening round of 65 teams through the Final Four and Championship game! And FanFeedr’s real-time sports news feed is also a great tool for users to do their research on each team before making their March Madness picks. March Madness Pick’Em players can go the site or iPhone application to check their updated status and compare it to their friends, co-workers and other users.

The March Madness Pick’Em doesn’t utilize a traditional bracketing system but instead offers users the opportunity to earn badges for each round. There will be five special March Madness badges for the five rounds of tournament games. Users who pick 75% or more of the winning teams in each round earn that round’s special badge, leading to their ability to pick the winner of the national championship game and earn the NCAA Champion badge. “This format creates even more competition to see who can earn more badges throughout the tournament and to see where a player ranks among their friends, as well as other March Madness users,” says Ahmad-Taylor.

In addition to its March Madness game, FanFeedr’s Pick’Em sports social gaming platform offers users the opportunity to compete with their friends for bragging rights and reputation badges in picking the winners of NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, NASCAR, NCAA and other top sports. With the upcoming NBA Playoffs, NHL Stanley Cup and the World Cup, FanFeedr will also offer special games for users to show their picking prowess for these championship series and special sporting events.

Here’s how Pick’Em works: users earn points and badges based upon their success at picking team winners. “The badges that FanFeedr users obtain for their winning picks show up on Facebook and Twitter (if the user wishes) and dovetails nicely with the competitive nature of sports enthusiasts, while allowing our users to show off who knows more,” says Ahmad-Taylor.

FanFeedr Pick’Em plays to the prestige factor and competitive nature of sports fans everywhere. The ultimate goal for FanFeedr users is to earn the coveted Commissioner badge as the top fan of a particular sport. “There is only one Commissioner badge per sport and the fan at the top of the heap is going to be really competitive about keeping that badge. It is much like the ‘Mayor’ badge in FourSquare, and we’ll have real-world opportunities for the Commissioners that provide them access that other fans will envy,” added Ahmad-Taylor.

Pick’Em is a natural extension of FanFeedr’s real-time sports content aggregation platform that provides users with their personalized sports fix. “It’s all part of FanFeedr’s strategy to give fans what they want,” says Ahmad-Taylor. “The web can be overwhelming, but we narrow it down to serve up only the content a fan wants to see in one place. And now users can enjoy their FanFeedr experience even more by having a lot of fun playing Pick’Em.”

ABOUT FANFEEDR

Based in NYC, FanFeedr is the leader in providing fans with their real-time personalized sports feed for their favorite teams and players, and presents an up-to-date collection of related news, video, Tweets, scores and information. FanFeedr currently aggregates and indexes over 7,000 sources of sports content and matches them against more than 55,000 athletes, 4,000 sports teams, including 1,700 colleges and universities, across 15 sports. FanFeedr uses Facebook and Twitter for user authentication and login so that fans never need to sign up for another social network. The seamless Facebook and Twitter integration also means that fans can talk about sports directly on Facebook and Twitter simply by publishing comments via the ‘Comment’ feature on every page. FanFeedr invites users to offer suggestions via the Feedback tab on the left of every page. In addition, Fanfeedr has recently launched FanFeedr Mobile with a new iPhone application that can be found here: http://bit.ly/iphoneappff. For more information about the company, go to http://www.fanfeedr.com/about.

# # #

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

This is a post about traffic that I paid for, and the results, and traffic that I didn’t pay for, and the results.

The former: Early on at FanFeedr, I had big-company-itis, and I paid $2,000 for 10 radio spots, or $200/per spot. This was for sports talk radio, obstensibly, but my bookers placed me on shows that had little to do with sports, so I cancelled the contract at the halfway point.

When I did appear on a demographically-accurate radio show, I could see the number of users on the site in real-time, as we use a betaworks‘ portfolio company, Chartbeat, to monitor our real-time traffic flows. This was shortly after our alpha launch, last summer, so any customer was a good customer. This is what we did, across five interviews that averaged eight minutes apiece in markets like Los Angeles, New York, Providence, Hartford: 10 extra visitors to the site. The CPA (cost-per-acquisition) was a highly-absurd $200, regardless of the number of shows, as my $2,000 partial deposit was not refundable.

There is one hurdle in mentioning our site name on radio: it is missing the trailing “e” in FanFeeder, as you would say it naturally, and my efforts to stress that missing “e” did nothing to encourage intrepid radio fans across the country from coming to the site. Since they clearly had no previous exposure to the site, as we had launched a week earlier, this entire strategy was a waste of money.

Then, this Monday, 1 March 2010, I got a message from a producer of ESPN2’s SportsNation that we would be mentioned as one of their “Sites We Like,” as you can see below:

Based on the radio experience, I didn’t expect anything traffic-wise based on 10 seconds of exposure before cutting to a commercial, but they actually showed the site name in a fashion that is clear enough to read. And here are the numbers, based on our appearance at the 33m mark, in the middle of a one-hour show:

1 March 2010 | 04.33p ET (initial broadcast)

• 93 extra site visitors

1 March 2010 | 11.33p ET (repeat)

• 34 extra site visitors

2 March 2010 | 01.33a ET (repeat)

• 37 extra site visitors

Simply put: those incremental 164 visitors came from 10 seconds of television exposure on ESPN2 at odd hours. Those visitors, however, have been more highly engaged, surprisingly, on the site, than traffic that we get from social networks, which tends to be flightier (less time spent per visit) than traffic that we acquire through organic search. Specifically, these new visitors spent 27 seconds longer on the site than traffic from social networks.

Additionally, they engaged with our Pick’Em game at a higher rate than social networks or search engines. The latter makes a lot of sense, as the search engine traffic is much more directed and less around general sports topics of interest than the traffic from social networks. The Pick’Em game (“Who do you think will win, Arsenal or Portsmouth?” (Only the dimmest of bulbs would chose Portsmouth, BTW)) reflects picks, results and badges back on Facebook, and thus is one of the most pandemic (a hyper-form of virality that we just made up) channels that we have for acquiring new customers. This channel is based on prestige, which we have discussed before.

Scott is right in his advocacy for finding other channels for audience development outside of Facebook, Twitter and the search engines, but I cannot begin to suggest that happenstance mentions on television networks are a marketing channel.

But when it does happen, it can provide a nice, small bump for a web site that is seeking a much larger audience. Connecting through video with people who are fanatical about sports has potential as a marketing channel, and the good thing for us is that even if we don’t get the direct traffic, we can power other sites with sports-related goals through our API (which has aggregated news and information as well as the Pick’Em game.)

Your friends at FanFeedr

More content: Over 6,700 sources

That’s it, more racing stuff coming this week.

Thanks for supporting us, FanFeedr

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

To all of you who have played: thank you. To all of you who haven’t tried it out: it couldn’t be simpler (see?). We have also learned a lot, and as a result, we are going to make some changes to the badges and the points that you get. The Cliffs’ Notes version:

• We changed the amount that you win per game to represent the “real” cost of the outcome (since we aren’t using lines.) That means that you can’t automatically double your points with each bet, but it doesn’t change that a win is a win.
• We changed the badging system to make it fairer. There are some single days where NCAA Basketball has over 123 games in a single day. We factored that against the limited number of NFL games, the total number of games in baseball, and so on, so that the badge levels represent your skill level, fairly in each sport.

Net-net: you will see new badges on your profile as of tomorrow, and it will be harder to get the top badges. That having been said, you will find badge achievement more rewarding.

We are also going to introduce a “Top Badge” for each sport, which is the equivalent of being a Mayor in FourSquare. No more fussing about who knows the most about the NFL, you will have a single winner.

Please let us know what else that we can do to make Pick’Em more fun for you, by giving us Pick’Em feedback here.

Thanks as always, FanFeedr

You must have Adobe Flash Player 9
or higher installed to view this content

src="http://www.adobe.com/images/shared/download_buttons/get_flash_player.gif"/>

Thanks for checking it out, FanFeedr