

Show HN: My NBA + Twitter mashup - billcurt
http://www.tweetsfc.com/basketball

======
danielna
Cool idea. I'm a diehard Washington Wizards fan (sad, I know) and tend to
unfollow a lot of players in favor of reports/beat writers/bloggers. The
tweets are just more substantive for basketball junkies. A couple of random
thoughts:

1) Remove the directed tweets -- i.e. "@user blah blah blah"

2) Beat writers/bloggers act as a filter and tend to retweet interesting
player tweets anyway

3) It'd be awesome to see a real-time, in-game twitter dashboard like how
you're displaying things now, but with those bloggers/reporters. It can be
hard to keep track of it all on a single-line twitter feed... maybe a tweet
that gets a lot of "action" somehow (retweets, replies, not sure how you'd
measure it) could be displayed more prominently.

~~~
ssharp
I'll definitely back up the desire to see feeds of reporters and bloggers
rather than, or in addition to, players.

For example, I'm a Cavs fan. Big news right now is the Cavs' search for a new
head coach. I'm much more interested in that than I am C.J. Miles' desire to
get "custom car stuff" done, which is what his last tweet was about :) But
players aren't going to be tweeting about the coaching search, most likely.

~~~
jelled
You may be interested in checking out my startup which organizes sports
journalists tweets by league and team. <http://www.fancloud.com/nba/cavaliers>

------
mattezell
I really like this! Admittedly, I am not a roundball enthusiast and know
little of the sport, so take my 2-cents for what they are worth.

I've clicked around a bit, just to get a feel for the app, and it seems really
nice. I love the transitions when selecting a team - very nice.. I also really
like how resizing and scaling is handled - it seems that lot of effort was put
into how the layout and contents shift around on resize and scale... Very
nice.

One small potential enhancement (solely aesthetics) would be to apply the same
UI transition behavior when clicking the site logo so that it smoothly
transitions back to home just as it does when selecting a team.

In any case, Kudos! Nice looking site - I am sharing this out to my non-HN,
pro-basketball, Twitter using friends!

~~~
billcurt
Hey thanks for the tip, noted. Glad you enjoy it!

------
akmiller
I actually started doing something similar to follow my own teams (thought
someday I'd expand but just never have). Anyhow, one thing we've found is that
player tweets are generally worthless and as others have already noted the
bloggers/writers and just conversational tweets surrounding teams are often
more informative.

Here is my page (which is not near as nice as yours but I really just built it
for me to follow news regarding my Chiefs!):

<http://sportszealots.com/1-Kansas-City-Chiefs.html>

~~~
billcurt
I've heard this comment from a number of people, thanks for posting. I agree,
an aggregate of bloggers/writer alongside player tweets would be a nice added
value, thinkin' on it.

------
mattkahl
Looks awesome! Great idea and execution. I tweeted it at Jalen Rose and Bill
Simmons.

Minor things:

\- You're throwing a bunch of log statements right now. Might be taking down
the javascript in IE (I didn't see if you wrapped `console.log`).

\- Remember, `this.$el` can replace `$(this.el)` (gotta love those convenience
methods, I see you're using `this.$(selector)`).

\- Also, UnderscoreJS provides `_.isUndefined` and `_.has` which is a little
nicer than the `typeof foo.bar !== undefined` test.

~~~
billcurt
Wow, thank you. To be honest I'm quite new to js, especially backbone and
those other util libs like underscore. Really appreciate the CR, will fix
shortly.

------
ashbrahma
Check out the CBS Sports app on iOS and Android. It has curated Twitter lists
for all sports and leagues - iOS : <https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/cbs-
sports/id307184892?mt=8> ; Android:
[https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.handmark.s...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.handmark.sportcaster&hl=en)

~~~
jonaldomo
Interesting note: CBS Sports app is developed by a Kansas City, MO mobile
development company called Handmark.

~~~
ashbrahma
Sorry - I meant to put a disclaimer on it. I work at Handmark and we had
originally developed an app called Sportcaster that got rebranded as CBS
Sports this year.

------
prg318
It looks like someone [1] already had a similar idea, but I like the interface
of tweetsfc over Hashtag Basketball. Your site looks a lot more professional.
Its also nice to see the follow links to each player's twitter. I will be
sharing this with my other NBA-fan friends!

[1] <http://hashtagbasketball.com/>

------
rserna
Pretty cool stuff. Maybe you should consider mixing up the tweets a bit
though. Right now they seem to be strictly in chronological order and
sometimes players shoot out 3 or 4 tweets at a time, so how about mixing it a
bit so it's still in relative chronological order, but mix in other players.
Not sure if that conveys what I'm thinking though.

~~~
billcurt
Ah I see what you mean, cool idea! Will see what I can cook up.

~~~
pionar
This is really awesome. One suggestion, make it more user-friendly by turning
twitter handles into links, and web links as well.

~~~
billcurt
True, this is the case for individual tweets but not in the list view, noted.

------
prpetten
Cool stuff, do you have an open-source version? I'd love to use this type of
format for similar stuff I'm working on.

~~~
billcurt
Check out <http://isotope.metafizzy.co/> created by David DeSandro. You'll be
able to do just about everything you see with it :)

~~~
prpetten
Awesome! Thanks, I'm going to add it to <http://verbalcommits.com>

------
xlance
Couldn't this work for everything else as well? Curated lists for different
gatherings of people?

"Everyone playing in this golf tourney/chess tourney" "Everyone on the set of
Game of Thrones/The Walking dead" "Every CEO of Fortune 500"

~~~
billcurt
In its current state, absolutely. That would be really cool actually. I do
have some more sports specific enhancements on the roadmap which may or may
not fit well with general topics groups of tweeters.

------
edwinnathaniel
This is pretty sweet.

I have a small website related to NBA[1] as well that I built on my free time
(many moons ago). Haven't updated the site yet but will definitely update it
again for the next season.

[1] www.nbaschedulesapp.com

------
mathattack
For what it's worth, the first thing I did was send it to my brother with,
"Hey, your kids may be interested in this." That was a reaction independent of
any bias towards the source.

Great work - I think you're on to something!

------
SurfScore
This is awesome. I love the Celtics, but I had to go search all the players
out manually when I wanted to follow them.

The only problem is most NBA players don't exactly give
you...substantial...information in their many tweets.

------
nmkn
This is super slick! I'm digging the interface. I'm assuming that you used
ESPN's api in someway because I see their logo at the bottom. Which api's did
you end up using if you don't mind me asking?

~~~
billcurt
Hey thanks man! ESPN has a handful of open apis that I'm using, mainly the
atheltes and teams resources. Check out the full list at
<http://developer.espn.com/docs>

------
kohanz
Graet job! I'm a die-hard and long-suffering Raptors fan and would definitely
peruse this page from time to time.

I'm also working on a web app in the NBA space, so I'm inspired by your work.

~~~
billcurt
Cheers man - from a fellow Canadian.

------
ioddly
Looks real cool man! You've got the wrong James Anderson on the Rockets page.
I don't think he has a twitter, actually.

~~~
billcurt
You're right, just removed him. Thanks for the tip.

------
ringular
Hooray for having soccer teams in there! I'm going to use this to keep tabs on
Juventus! :D

------
joezhou
Love the infini scrolling, wasn't clear in the beginning though b/c there's no
load spinner

~~~
billcurt
Good point, added to the list. Thanks!

------
phreeza
At first I read: My MBA + Twitter mashup, and was wondering what on earth that
might be.

------
jburgueno
Really good idea! but the best is that the UI looks and feels really great.
Great job.

~~~
billcurt
Hey thanks for the note :)

------
banders
Nice Work! I'm curious, it says "Built with ESPN", did you use the ESPN API?

~~~
billcurt
Hey thanks! Yeah I should clarify on the site, I'm just using a few open ESPN
APIs. <http://developer.espn.com/docs>

------
mccolin
This is really cool. Would love to see further expansion into other leagues.

~~~
billcurt
Totally, which league(s) would you like to see added next?

~~~
mccolin
All of the major US sports (NBA, NFL, MLB, NHL) would be great.

~~~
billcurt
Roger that! Stay tuned via @tweetsFC :)

------
manoji
Amazing idea .really love it . How come there is no Dwyane Wade ?

~~~
billcurt
Woah, can't believe I missed that! Thanks for the heads up, fixed now.
<http://www.tweetsfc.com/basketball/team/miami-heat>

------
watercup
This is decent. If you like it you should look into tintup.com

~~~
flowerntea
<http://www.dallascowboys.com/news/tony-romo-contract.html>

The Cowboys are using it.

------
kylelibra
This is great. I'd love to see this for other sports.

~~~
podman
I built something simliar to this back in 2009 for college football coaches. I
was planning on adding more for other sports as well as for players but there
weren't too many using twitter back then:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100325212936/http://www.coachtw...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100325212936/http://www.coachtweets.com/)

Seems like everyone is tweeting these days and this is a much slicker
interface than the one I built. Good job!

------
jonsagara
Lifelong Kings fan here. Nice work!

------
dialsquare1886
Good work! Just what I needed!

------
mediagearbox
This is brilliant, well done!

~~~
billcurt
Thank you!

------
abdophoto
This is great. Thank you!

~~~
billcurt
My pleasure!

~~~
ritonlajoie
The UI is very nice, I am really impressed. What did you use to make that ?

~~~
billcurt
Credit goes to @desandro on twitter for creating this magical library
<http://isotope.metafizzy.co/>

------
p0larboy
pushstate?

~~~
billcurt
You bet. Helps me sleep at night.

