In a fairytale case of ask-and-ye-shall-receive, we issued a call for sports-related apps, and startup FanFeedr answered that call.
FanFeedr allows users to select topics of interest and find (hopefully) relevant scores, photos, news, videos, and blog posts. It also plays nicely with Twitter and Facebook. Their search function was buggy (we kept getting redirected to “all content” rather than info for our search terms), which makes it difficult to adjust the firehose of available information, but the concept is nevertheless intriguing.
When a user steps outside the FanFeedr site proper, content is framed at the bottom to allow for cross-site commenting and sharing.
Signing up to use the site is a simple, two-click Facebook Connect process. Users can follow one another on the site, and FanFeedr also pulls in feeds from pro athletes, such as the official L.A. Lakers Twitter feed. Users can moreover choose to be fans of teams or players; those allegiances are then displayed on the user’s profile.
Also, very little content, from in-site comments and status updates to shares and comments on third-party sites and links, seems to live only on the FanFeedr site; almost everything is or can be pushed to Twitter and Facebook.
Hopefully, we’ll see more integration with more social sites in the future. According to site rep Ty Ahmad-Taylor, “We are about to integrate with Digg, UberVu, and Bit.ly to give an even more comprehensive view of trending topics in the world of sports using our ‘Hotness’ algorithm.”
So far, FanFeedr is available as a free iPhone app, and their API is available and in use by several developers.
Overall, a cleaner UI, more mobile capabilities, better content filters, and better search functionality would be nice to see, but FanFeedr is a good step toward a network- and league-agnostic, do-it-all sports app.
Give it a shot, and let us know what you think in the comments.
