Locker Pulse Product Blog

We’ve been a bit quiet lately with our feature releases, but with good reason. We’re gearing up for a massive relaunch of LockerPulse!

Since we initially conceived of LockerPulse in 2009 and subsequently launched in May of 2010 a lot has changed with how we as consumers use the web. For sites like LockerPulse, touch interfaces on phones and tablets are rapidly approaching the usage of traditional computers. Very few people saw this coming – heck the iPad had only been released a few weeks before that first version of LockerPulse came out!

We’ve spent a lot of time since May of 2010 studying our analytics, talking to our users, and paying close attention to how the web has evolved.

So what can you expect? Better coverage of more teams and more sports. An easier-to-use experience, starting with a better initial sign-up. Quicker access to the other things that are important to you in addition to the news: schedules, standings, scores, and videos. A more consistent experience across all devices – from your work PC to your laptop to your iPad to your Android phone – it will always “feel” like the same LockerPulse. And many more improvements that we hope show you that we’re committed to making this the very best platform for consuming sports news.

When can you expect the new LockerPulse? We’re shooting for releasing this in Q1 of 2012, most likely towards the end of March. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions, please leave a comment below or shoot us an email. We’re always excited to hear from our users!

Today we’ve added the ability to use keyboard shortcuts to speed up how quickly you can move from one story to the next. Any time you’re reading news, either on a team page or your My News or My Players when logged in, you can use the “J” key to move down to the previous story or the “K” key to move up to the next story. This feature will be familiar to anyone who has ever used keyboard shortcuts in Google Reader or Gmail.

When we tested this feature it worked for us on all major browsers. If you run in to any issues, or if you have any suggestions for additional keyboard features, definitely leave a comment below or drop us an email.

On Friday the Florida Marlins unveiled their new stadium, uniforms, and officially changed their name to the Miami Marlins. We’ve updated their name and colors across our site, including on the Miami Marlins page:

We’ve also fixed one of the more annoying bugs for fans who follow a lot of Yahoo Sports news sources. Our system detects duplicate stories by the permanent URL of the story. In almost all cases, there is only one single URL per story, which never changes, and this system works remarkably well. However, Yahoo sometimes uses multiple URLs per story and changes them in their feeds. For instance, a recent story on their hockey blog Puck Daddy entitled Thursday’s Three Stars: First-place Panthers; big Avs rally was posted under the following three URLs:

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thursday-s-Three-Stars-First-place-Panthers-bi?urn=nhl-wp17159

http://sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thursday-8217-s-Three-Stars-First-place-Panthe?urn=nhl-wp17159

http://ca.sports.yahoo.com/nhl/blog/puck_daddy/post/Thursday-s-Three-Stars-First-place-Panthers-bi?urn=nhl-wp17159

Our system detected them as three separate stories and inserted them three times over the course of the day. It can be very distracting to see the same story in your news stream over and over. Because this has been an ongoing problem for Yahoo Sports feeds, we’ve added an extra check for Yahoo stories where we also check for a matching title within the past day and only post if there are no matches. Hopefully from here on out this is no longer an issue. We also now have this functionality available to use on other news sources if similar issues are detected. If you notice anything similar don’t hesitate to leave a comment or drop us an email.

Today we released one of our most anticipated new features: fantasy sports player tracking. Simply visit the new Fantasy tab, enter in your fantasy team, and we’ll provide you with updates as news happens. You can filter news by league or player on the left nav, just as you can filter by team or source in My News. We’re scanning over 25 of the best fantasy news sites on the web for the absolute latest information.

Here are a few screenshots (click to enlarge):

Add a Fantasy Player

My Fantasy News

Fantasy player tracking also works on mobile LockerPulse. After logging in you’ll see the My Players heading.

You may notice some other improvements throughout the site. We’ve worked hard on improving the speed of the most common actions on the site. We’ve completed a a full javascript overhaul – our new library is smaller and lighter, meaning faster load times for you. We’ve also made other speed improvements across the site. For instance, stories from external sites load much faster in the frame. After logging in, you’ll also notice a new navigation and slicker interface. In addition to fantasy coverage we’ve made it easy to access full schedules, standings, and rosters available for all NFL, MLB, NBA, and NHL teams.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions, leave a comment below or drop us an email. Good luck with your fantasy teams!

As you can see from the image above, we’ve added the Winnipeg Jets back in to the NHL, replacing the Atlanta Thrashers. We’ve also transitioned the sources to Winnipeg blogs and newspapers from their Atlanta counterparts.

For college sports, we’ve done the following:

• Moved Colorado from the Big 12 to the Pac-12.
• Added Utah to the Pac-12.
• Moved Nebraska from the Big 12 to the Big Ten.
• Added TCU in anticipation for their move to the Big East in 2012

If you’re a fan of these teams let us know if we’ve missed any good news sources by leaving a comment below or dropping us an email.

We’ve worked closely with SnappCloud and Toshiba to make LockerPulse available in the Toshiba App Place. If you’re using a Toshiba device, the App Place is a great way to integrate web apps like LockerPulse in to your computer. You can “install” LockerPulse from the App Place by visiting this link. You’ll be able to sign up and launch LockerPulse right from the App Place!

We’ve launched a nice, albeit minor, improvement to the Team Info tab. Your team’s full schedule and standings are now available at a quick glance. This is just the beginning of us better integrating things such as scores, schedules, standings, tickets, etc that are complementary to your sports news reading. We hope to improve your LockerPulse experience by giving you all of the supplemental information that you need right at your finger tips.

Also, special thanks to the team at FanFeedr. Our schedules and standings are powered by their fantastic developer API.

Enjoy the Holiday weekend everyone!

Today we’ve added a bunch of new sports to our coverage. For each sport we scoured the web and found the very best sites, blogs, and newspapers to give you a mix of news on par with the level of coverage that we provide for each individual team.

We’ve added twelve sports to our “Headlines” section. You can access them anywhere on the site by clicking on “Headlines” in the upper left hand corner:

If you’re a registered user, you can now subscribe to your favorite sports just like you subscribe to your favorite teams. Simply head on over to the “Settings” “Manage Sources” tab when logged in and you’ll now see all of the new sports listed under the “Add a Team” dropdown:

And of course, if you haven’t signed up, you should head on over to our registration page to get started. We’ve also released a simpler signup process to make it even easier to pick your favorites and get started quickly and simply.

Two of the more frequent requests we receive from people are “I’m an NBA fan in general and I don’t follow any one team, I just want a lot of good NBA coverage” and “why don’t you have coverage for Soccer/Golf/MMA/NASCAR”. Hopefully this will help people in both camps, as well as other fans looking to supplement their team coverage with some more in depth coverage of their favorite sports.

If we’ve missed any good news sources, or there’s a sport you’d like covered that we didn’t get, please leave us a comment below or drop us an email.

One of the most common complaints we get from our Twitter followers is that it takes two clicks to read the story that we’re linking to – a first click to visit LockerPulse, and a second to read the full story and not just the summary. While we want our Twitter users to see the value in LockerPulse and hopefully sign up and give it a try, we also want them to be able to continue to receive the news solely via Twitter in the most efficient manner if they so choose. To hopefully get the best of both worlds, we’ve introduced an improved landing page today that allows you to read the full story while also introducing some of the benefits of LockerPulse, such as related stories, as well as visiting the site of the original content provider (something that’s also important). We hope that this is a win-win-win scenario for everyone. As always, comments and feedback are encouraged.

Earlier this week Google announced a College Basketball Tournament 2011 page. The page allows you to view scores, schedules, fill out a bracket on Google Docs, use Google Earth to explore the tournament cities and venues, and of course install Chrome Web Apps like LockerPulse to keep up with the latest team news.