WebProNews

Tag: Feeds

  • ESPN Launches SportsCenter Feed, A Twitter-Like Stream of All Things Sports

    Twitter’s quick-hit, real-time format is good for all kinds of news – especially sports. Sports fans can create lists of their favorite athletes, reporters, and official team accounts and easily see all of the breaking news as it develops. The product development team over at ESPN surely know this, and have created their own platform that boast a streaming feed of sports news and closely resembles the Twitter experience.

    It’s called SportsCenter Feed, and today just launched in beta.

    The feed features scores, stats, highlights, articles, videos, and audio content from all over ESPN.com and many of its affiliates. Users can sort their feed to show all stories, top stories, most popular stories, or simply browse videos. It’s all of the news available on ESPN’s network of sports sites, all in one convenient stream.

    Logging in to your ESPN.com account automatically loads your previously-saved favorite sports, so that you can limit the SportsCenter Feed to just stream stories from a select view areas – for instance NCAA Football, NFL, NCAA Basketball, and Golf only.

    Here’s what it looks like:

    Clicking on any story from the feed on the left opens it up on the right-hand column. According to GigaOM, the stream will not feature long pieces or content from related sites like Grantland – just all of the content available on ESPN.com and affiliates.

    We produce so much content over time it becomes difficult to uncover it all for fans,” said ESPN’s SVP of Product Ryan Spoon. “Our goal is to create another presentation layer that is real time and is streaming.”

    SportsCenter Feed will stream over 1,000 updates every day, and will eventually get its own mobile app. You can also expect to see SportsCenter Feed thrown into other ESPN products, possibly something like the WatchESPN app

  • Add Your Foursquare Check-ins to Google Calendar

    If you’re a world traveler, or simply someone who tends to have a few too many drinks while out on the town, it’s hard to remember all the places you’ve been. If you want an easy, hands-free way to log all of your past stops, Foursquare wants to help.

    Today, Foursquare is announcing that you can now import all of your Foursquare check-in data directly to Google Calendar. All you have to do it go to foursquare.com/feeds, log in, and click the “add my check-in history to my Google Calendar” link.

    Of course, you can always check your Foursquare history to access every check-in you’ve ever made, but adding your check-ins to Google Calendar means that they will update automatically. if you’re a Google Calendar user, this link-up is really a no-brainer.

    Foursquare reminds us that it’s probably not a wise idea to share your specific feeds with anyone, since they do contain your entire Foursquare check-in history (private check-ins and all).

  • New Google Reader Feature Can Create a Feed for Any Site

    Google has launched a new feature for Google Reader that lets users create a custom feed to track changes on pages that don’t have their own feed. In other words, you can follow changes to any site.

    "These custom feeds are most useful if you want to be alerted whenever a specific page has been updated," says Google’s Brian Shih. "For example, if you wanted to follow Google.org’s latest products, just type ‘http://www.google.org/products.html’ into Reader’s ‘Add a subscription’ field. Click "create a feed", and Reader will periodically visit the page and publish any significant changes it finds as items in a custom feed created just for that page."

    Custom Feeds from Google Reader

    Google points to examples like the Zillow home page, which would show new real estate listings, a Macy’s special offers page, which would keep one informed of the latest special offers, and the NYU Computer Science Department page, which features news and highlights. You can certainly see the possibilities that this feature could open up. If data overload was a problem for you before, this probably isn’t going to help. However, if you are looking to stay informed and up to date on even more web content, this might be just the ticket.

    This new feature appears to solve any potential problems that could arise in the future with relation to the dying of RSS feeds. I’m not saying that they’re dying, but some think they will, and if sites stop putting out RSS feeds, a feature like this would presumably allow you to continue using your feed reader to follow those sites anyway.

    The feature provides short snippets of page changes so users can decide if the changes are enough to make the page worth going to. If you have a site, and you don’t want Google to crawl or create feeds for it, you can opt-out. To do so, Google says you can:

    • Add a <meta name="googlebot" content="noarchive"> tag to any page you don’t want available in Reader. Google compares the cached and current versions of your page to determine if that page has been updated. Adding the NOARCHIVE meta tag will prevent Google from caching your page.
       
    • Use robots.txt to block Googlebot from crawling your site. (You can block your entire site, or a file or directory.) However, if you decide to block Googlebot, your content will not be available to appear in search results. Doing this will not remove the previously generated feed from Reader, but Reader will stop generating feeds after this measure has been taken.

    There are a few things that can prevent a site from being picked up by this feature. It only supports English-language content in HTML. Updates to content in iFrames and updates to content that requires signing in to view are not detected.

    Related Articles:

    > Google Reader’s Mobile Interface Upgraded

    > Google Makes Google Reader More Personal

    > Google Reader Gets Much-Needed Social Features