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.
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.
Also, thank you for making software for sports fans. The stuff from the big media companies is freaking terrible. Let me know if you'd like to participate in a future Sports Hack Day:
They have a pretty good backcourt with Beal and Wall. If they can unload the attractive expiring massive contract of Okafor and Nene via trades, they can rebuild the team.
The Wizards always had potential from having Webber and Ben Wallace prior to their prime; then to having Michael Jordan in come back and then to Agent Zero.
The problem was bad luck with Arenas injury, bad Kwame Brown pick.
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!
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!):
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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...
Seems like everyone is tweeting these days and this is a much slicker interface than the one I built. Good job!
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.