SportSpyder Blog

Happy Holidays! We just wanted to write a quick blurb to let you know of recent features we have added and some old ones you may not know about.

• Linking Preference: You can now go to your profile page and choose whether you want links to open in the same page or to a new tab (window if using IE6)
• Custom News: Did you know you can pick and choose what sources you see for every team? If you click on the custom button on any team articles page you can include more sources or exclude the ones you aren’t interested in reading. This is especially helpful for NY based teams with so many different sources
• Combined News Page: Do you like the Mets, Rangers and Jets? Or the Red Sox/Patriots/Celtics? You can get the news of these teams combined by just adding them as your favorite teams and clicking the “All Teams Combined” link.
• Widgets: Did you know you can add headlines to your blog? If you have any troubles at all with getting this set up just send us a message and we will help you out. If you are interested in a more robust solution for building an application with direct links for a sport/team/player/search please contact us as we are working on an API that people can subscribe to.
• Tweets! Yes we have tweet lists for both sports and teams. We are aggregating tweets from thousands of sports personalities. These pages are great for following games, following events like drafts, the MLB hot stove and other sports news in near real time. If you missed one of your favorite team personalities just let us know!
• Articles: We are now crawling over 3700 sources! However if we missed your favorite beat writer or blogger let us know.

We aren’t going to ask you to buy or donate anything but if you enjoy using SportSpyder PLEASE share us with your friends! Give us a shout out on your Facebook page, your Twitter account, your blog or just send your friends an email and it will be GREATLY appreciated.

The MLB trade deadline was last Friday. It was fascinating and exciting to see our MLB sports tweets page give a realtime view of all the rumors and trades as they went down from various media, bloggers, players and beat writers on twitter.

We have a number of additional updates coming that will also let you follow normal fan chatter and participate in the discussion if you want to. If you have any thoughts or suggestions please send us a tweet @sportspyder!

Do you really want the know the pulse of sports at any given moment? Now you can with our new sports tweet aggregation!

Right now we are aggregating tweets by sport and team from various sports personalities. Who do we consider a sport personality? Well we wanted to reduce the noise/spam and provide quality information so we aggregate tweets from:

• players
• beat-writers
• national sports writers
• bloggers
• coaches
• newspapers
• mainstream media
• mascots
• radio personalities
• television personalities

We are also aggregating team news by Twitter hash tag searches (ie #Mets). This view provides an interesting look into the current conversations people are having about the team and you can choose participate in the conversation by tweeting with the same team hashtag from your twitter account.

We have released this functionality for all MLB teams and you can look for NFL team tweets in the upcoming week.

Did we miss your favorite sports personality? Tell us at @sportspyder.

We finally set up our company blog. We have had an internal one for a while now that we use mostly for a reference on things we do such as setting up our servers and other processes. We will use this blog to reach out to our users for feedback, inform our users of changes and features, extend our sites documentation, vent, and share lessons we have learned with the start-up world.

Right now I am working on revamping our College Hoops sources. As you can imagine with the number of teams out there this is no small task. When I work on a team I want to make sure that we are the best possible resource by the time I finish for getting news so it takes a lot of time and effort. I’m concentrating with the top 25 teams according to the various polls out there. If you think we are missing sources for your favorite teams shoot us a note from our contact page on SportSpyder.com.

-Dallas