Blog Posts From Active Product Development Tagged With product_development

The Sportspower API

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:50:37 GMT

Sportspower is a leading highschool team sports ranking website. It contains a complicated algorithm that factors in things like win/loss record, homefield advantage, state division and school size to calculate team rankings at the divisional and national levels. Take a look at the national ranking for "mega" highschool football teams on Sportspowerhttp://www.sportspower.com/football/teams/high-school/football/texas/cedar-hill-longhorns/2034/ratings/mega/spc.

Rankings data is available through an open API, and we partnered early on with ESPN Rise to feature football rankings on their site. Check out the bottom right-hand corner of http://espn.go.com/high-school-sports/rise/football/ where they build a widget consuming the Rankings API. The API is now available for all developers to leverage in their applications or websites.

Read up on the Sportspower API on developer.active.com. Typically, the API is used to:

Determine the geographic context for ranking data by querying the Playoff Group, Playoff Subgroups or Sportspower School Size Classification API for the relevant group ID (i.e. "60" for all very large highschools in the United States).
Use the geographic context (group ID) to get a list of rankings for a given sport.

During the initial rollout, only highschool football (api.sportspower.com/football/) and basketball (api.sportspower.com/basketball/) is supported with lacrosse data from laxpower.com soon to follow.

Active.com Data Featured on ESPN and Livestrong.com

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 21:44:38 GMT

Livestrong.com and ESPN Rise are new additions to a growing list of websites featuring active.com data through integration to the active.com API. As Geoff Skow writes on developer.active.com:

Demand Media's LIVESTRONG.com, a “practical resource to find a wealth of health-related information from a wide range of sources”, taps into the Active.com directory of community events to add to the relevance and usefulness of its business listings. For example, the site includes an Active-powered list of nearby events to each of the pages in its Restaurant section:

ESPN Rise uses the SportsPower API Service to better fulfill its goal of offering “all the latest high school sports information, including scores, stats, rankings, polls and athlete profiles”. The site features the top ranked high school football teams across five classifications according to the Active Power Ratings. New ratings and rankings are unveiled every week throughout the season, and are generated at the national, state and local level.

We're excited about the uptake of our API and hope to see developers do new and innovative things with our data. You can read more about our API on programmableweb.com at http://www.programmableweb.com/api/active or read through the api specification at http://developer.active.com/docs.

Searchbeta.active.com Released

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 02:10:58 GMT

I'm happy to announce the release of searchbeta.active.com! We've been working for many months to improve upon our "Alpha" and today we're ready to open the new Search to you. Keep in mind it's still in beta and there are a few kinks. We're hoping to gather a lot of user feedback so that, when it comes time to replace search.active.com, we've built a product that you will love to use. Check out this screencast for details:

10 Principles of Agile Development

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 21:07:40 GMT

I came across these while reading the Agile Software Development blog and thought they were interesting enough to share here:

It's a difficult transition to move from Waterfall to Agile, especially with a distributed team. But if done correctly I'm convinced the payoffs in improved efficiency and quality could be great.

Publish/Subscribe

JeremyGThomas — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:24:24 GMT

^{image from Microsoft}

We're well underway developing the new search.active.com, and I thought I'd take a moment to discuss a realt-time, publish/subscribe messaging layer we're inserting into the Search architecture. In the beginning of my career I worked building distributed OSS/BSS applications integrating various line of business systems with products from a middleware vendor called TIBCO. During this time I was introduced to the concept of "[publish/subscribe|http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish/subscribe]", whereby an application sends one message that may be consumed by many disparate applications. For example, when a customer calls into a call center to order broadband internet, the customer service rep enters order details into a CRM system. When the order details have been captured, the CRM system submits the order for processing. Various applications might be interested in that order, including the workflow system which manages the provisioning process and the Customer Data Store application which warehouses all customer records. Though the publish/subscribe pattern, the CRM system simply publishes the "new order" message knowing nothing about the applications that might be interested in it. Interested systems then consume it and do work with the data.

Decoupling in this way yields a powerful layer of extensibility whereby "n" number of applications can be integrated to consume messages with no modification required to those that produce them.

TIBCO provided a messaging layer called Rendezvous that I worked with on several projects back in the early days. Rendezvous was the medium, or "Enterprise Service Bus" (ESB), through which messages were exchanged. It also cost about $100K. Cheaper (i.e. free) alternatives have come about since then, including an implementation of the XMPP protocol called ejabberd. While XMPP is widely thought to be an instant messaging protocol, it's publish/subscribe plugin makes it a good ESB candidate for simple messaging solutions. There are XMPP clients written in .NET, Java, Ruby, etc., so interoperability is maintained.

The new Search solution is trialing XMPP to synchronize ratings data with the search index. Functionally we've proven XMPP does the job as our prototype is using it today, and we're hoping the platform will be robust enough that we can broaden its use to other AMP initiatives which might include real-time registration notification and social message streaming.

I'm excited about the options publish/subscribe gives us architecturally speaking. Hopefully this is the first of many posts heralding this new design paradigm and highlighting its uses.

Adding a Little Zip

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 23:29:55 GMT

The update to active.com last week brought with it a significant improvement in load time and page size. We met last month to determine how we could give the site a bit more zip and came up with a solid list of about 8 items. One of those items, removal of “VIEWSTATE”, was included in our latest update. VIEWSTATE is a variable used in ASP.NET to make HTTP, a stateless protocol, act like a stateful one. Most of the pages on active.com, however, don’t require state, making VIEWSTATE extraneous. And on average VIEWSTATE added an additional 50 to 150 KB to page sizes to the site.

In our latest release we turned VIEWSTATE off. Data shows us that the site is about 23% faster and, with an average page size reduction of 27%, we’ll lower consumed bandwidth out of our production data center by about 500 to 800 GB/month.

Here’s a summary of performance improvement:

Homepage

Average Page Size: 17% reduction

Page Load Time: 18% faster

Event Details

Average Page Size: 38% reduction

Page Load Time: 26% faster

Channels (Running used as the control)

Average Page Size: 21% reduction

Page Load Time: 24% faster

Articles

Average Page Size: 32% reduction

Page Load Time: 27% faster

Moral of the story - turn off VIEWSTATE whenever and wherever you can.

Dear Consumer

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 21:38:21 GMT

Dear Consumer,

I’d like to address feedback we’re received about active.com from our uservoice forum and Twitter. I know I’ve written a few posts here already but thought it appropriate to take the time to introduce myself before diving in. I’m the Director of Product Development for what we internally call “Web Properties”. This includes half of www.active.com, results.active.com, search.active.com, community.active.com, coolrunning.com, sportspower.com, laxpower.com, developer.active.com and a slew of services that support these products. My job is to oversee a team of developers and quality assurance engineers administratively and architecturally. My team and I work closely with Product Management who’s job it is to prioritize features and bugs and communicate important information with the rest of the company. I came on board in February, 2008 with a background as an Enterprise 2.0 guy (I co-authored this book) and Management and Technology consultant where I talked to large companies about how best to leverage social media (Web 2.0).

In 2006 a bunch of smart people (Tim O’Reilly, Martin Fowler, John Musser from Programmableweb) met to define attributes of Web 2.0, and these attributes highlight a positive mental shift in the approach to developing web-based products. The first of the six attributes they identified was “Do one thing well”; stay single-purposed. Looking at the current active.com homepage it’s hard to tell what we’re trying to get you to do. We have information about events. We also have links to articles and blog posts produced by our Content team. And we have ads (gotta pay the bills somehow). We have a lot of purposes manifested on that page.

I have a passion for Web 2.0 and believe firmly that web properties should focus on you, the consumer. The fourth attribute the group defined was “Encourage participation”. To-date we haven’t always done a good job there. We have a lot of very interesting information that could help runners discover other runners – to make you want to connect with other like-minded athletes - but we’re not exploiting the data to that end…yet. We do have a strong Community team that oversees community.active.com where it is easy to participate. But we haven’t presented a clear path for you to understand that this option is available to you after you’ve registered for an event or when you’re planning your events for the year.

Web 2.0 preaches “Honest voice over Corporate speak”, and in following this spirit I wanted to address some of the feedback we’ve received over the past few months. We do get a lot of positive feedback, such as this "@activenetwork love active.com and use it for the races i sign up for. any opinion on my idea for sunblock+running? http://twurl.nl/wrws3h", and our page view metrics seem to indicate that people like using our site. But here are some not so positive things people have said.

1. Most Ridiculous Site I have (seen)

“Pardon me but your site is the most ridiuculous site I have ever used. It is not only confusing, it is difficult to navigate. Please hire a pro to re-organize the site, otherwise we "Active" people will be forced to use a crappy monopoly like ticketmaster to preregister for events.”

This is fair, in part, as we’re not giving you clear direction as to what we want you do to on our site. Regarding the half of www.active.com that I oversee technically, we’re working to make navigation more intuitive and consolidate the site’s purpose to make things much clearer for you. We’ll be launching the redesign in Beta in the next few months and will be looking for user feedback at that time.

We’re also working on a new registration platform (the part of the site I don’t oversee) that will improve user experience significantly when it comes to race registration. That product isn’t scheduled to be released for several months, but I’m excited about what I’ve seen so far.

2. Fix the Unsubscribe Link on your e-mails. Unsubscribe me

“you send out unwanted e-mails and then your unsubscribe link doesn't work so you tell people they can write to an address to unsubscribe. I don't think so. Fix your link!!!!”

Our unsubscribe links do work, but in most cases only unsubscribe you from that specific newsletter. Generally speaking, unsubscribing to newsletters is a complaint we receive often, and I understand how this can be frustrating. Soon we will be releasing a new page on www.active.com where you can view all of our newsletters, view those you’ve been subscribed to, and either A) opt-in to more or B) unsubscribe from each.

3. Dear Active.com, Know what are not events? Tshirts and running/relay teams. Why are they showing up in my event searches? Me

We know that search.active.com is far from perfect, and we set out at the beginning of the year to deliver a significantly enhanced search experience on active.com. While still in early alpha, we’re expecting to unveil the new search.active.com in Q4, and will reach out to a handful of you when we release our closed Beta for feedback.

4. Active.com is SNEAKY SNEAKY! Watch out for the $59.95 charge on your account

When you sign up for a race you have the option to opt-in to Active Advantage – a program that provides discounts on race registration and other products. And that program costs $59.95 annually. To be fair, the “opt-in” checkbox used to be automatically checked (a year or so ago, so it was an “opt-out” checkbox), and we received a lot of complaints like this one. But that’s no longer the case, and you have to check the box to be signed up. Regardless, if you think you were erroneously signed up for Active Advantage, support@active.com can always help you out.

I’m excited about how far active.com has come, and for where we will be in the near future. We have a bunch of new features and enhancements (such as improved page load times) in development now that I, as a Web 2.0 enthusiast, find enticing. More to come on these enhancements as they become available.

Regards,

Jeremy Thomas

The API is Live

JeremyGThomas — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 00:28:18 GMT

(cross-posted from developer.active.com)

After much anticipation I'm happy to announce the launch of our Event (Asset*) Syndication API. This is a simple XML/HTTP API that returns a list of events matching specified filters as per API documentation. A subset of our events can be queried through this service. These are (note the api_key below is a demo key, so use it at your own risk):

Triathlons - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/triathlon?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7
Cycling Events - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/cycling?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7
Running Events - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/running?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7
Environmentally Friendly Events - http://api.amp.active.com/assets/green?api_key=rnxjx6ts3pg579gvrbe42qn7

You might use this data to create an iPhone app of upcoming events or a widget for your website. We're excited to see what your ideas are. If you're interested in using the Event Syndication API, sign up for an account, register for an API key, and read our terms of use. We'll review your request and will get back to you (via email) asking you about what it is you'd like to do with the API. We're still scaling our infrasture so not all requests will be automatically approved.

*Note the word "Asset" appears in the title of this API as we have more than just event in our database, so generically we call these things assets.

Active Inspiration

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 22 May 2009 00:20:07 GMT

During a recent meeting somebody on my team came up with the idea of pulling in "inspirational" tweets, photos, videos from around the web for a given Active topic, like marathon or 10k. I thought it was a great idea, so we worked together to build a prototype and threw it on Labs.

Enter Active Inspiration. We're pulling in the latest tweets and photos about marathons, triathlons and cycling. I suppose you could say this was also inspired by flickrvision and twittervision, except ours is meme-based and also aggregates from multiple sources (we'll be adding more soon).

We think there are lots of interesting things we can do with this data. This is just the beginning. As always, let us know what you think.

Microformats on active.com

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 01 May 2009 23:52:58 GMT

Consider the following statements: Microsoft Corporation created C#. C# is used to develop computer programs.

Great.

Now think of all of the concepts and relationships between them that are introduced in this statement. As a human, interpreting these is dead simple.

Microsoft is a company
C# is a computer programming language
Microsoft created C#

But, making it so that a computer program can reduce this statement to concepts and the relationships between them is difficult. It is indeed a harrowing task to make computers derive the same meaning from natural language that people do.

Enter the The Semantic Web. The Semantic Web wants to convert the Internet into a database; to make it so computer programs can understand concepts and relationships between concepts contained within in the natural language on web pages.

Microformats are an element of the Semantic Web that define concepts (but don't do a good job of defining relationships), and we've recently introduced them on active.com. Microformats "...are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards" that make it possible to annotate a web page with metadata describing concepts contained within them. On active.com we've implemented the hCalendar microformat to annotate events.

Consider, for example, the Carlsbad 5000. Peering into the HTML source, you'll find:

<h3 class="summary">Carlsbad 5000</h3>

<span class="dtstart" title="Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 7:05 AM">Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 7:05 AM</span>

<span class="dtend" title="Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 10:05 AM">Sunday, April 05, 2009 @ 10:05 AM</span>

<span class="location">Carlsbad, CA</span><span class="uid"></span></div>

</div>

By annotating the "class" name attributes within the HTML elements according to the hCalendar standard, we can let a computer program know there's an event called the "Carlsbad 5000" on this web page, its start time, end time and location. The Tails Export Firefox plugin, for example, is a computer program that detects microformats on web pages. In the screenshot below we can see it detecting the hCalendar microformat on the Carlsbad 5000 event page:

This stuff's a little geeky sure. But we're proud to contribute to the Semantic Web! on active.com to come.

RSS Comes to active.com

JeremyGThomas — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 01:30:31 GMT

When I started working at active.com the first thing I noticed was that there were no RSS feeds on our pages. It seemed like a simple oversight to me. But, it turned out adding RSS was harder than one might think, mainly because we had to make sure all was kosher with our content partners.

Well, the time has finally arrived. RSS is now on active.com! Here are some feeds you may want to subscribe to:

RSS feeds for events are in store for the future so you can be notified when, say, next year's Carlsbad 5000 is available on active.com

Made Over

JeremyGThomas — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:22:28 GMT

After much anticipation we have finally released our new Event Details page. Check out the screencast below, browse around active.com and let us know what you think.

Active Classifieds new on Labs

JeremyGThomas — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 21:52:47 GMT

We've just released our newest project to labs.active.com, Active Classifieds. Have you ever wanted to assemble a group of people to block wind for you on a weekend ride or sell an old baseball glove?

Active Classifieds is a simple app designed to make it easy for you to sell your old sports stuff or meetup with like-minded people.

Dive in and let us know what you think.

Coming Soon.

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:15:51 GMT

Based on what our analytics tools tell us, many of you go straight to what we call our "event details" pages on active.com. These pages are designed to showcase information about, say, a 10k, to help you decide if you want to register or not (check out the event details page for the Niantic Bay 10K, for example).

We think there's a lot that can be improved about this page. Namely A) it's design, B) the speed at which it loads, and C) its lack of focus on, well, you. So we're starting into a sequence of updates that will spice things up bit. Here's a preview of what's coming in the first update.

It's got a completely re-vamped look and feel. We've also modified the reviews system, making it so people who review an event also rate it on a scale of 1 - 5 (using our fancy stars).

Future releases will include Youtube and Flickr integration as well as a host of other goodies. But look for this update in the next month or so!

Search Beta - Looking Good

JeremyGThomas — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 18:55:11 GMT

We now have over 100 users in our Search Beta, and the feedback we've received so far has been positive. One user has asked:

"I would love to see something interactive where I could quickly access different multimedia from past events. It wouldn't necessarily be official race photos (I'd actually prefer that they weren't) but even links to a search results page for the event's name in Flickr or YouTube would be great. Even a search OUTSIDE the active network, bringing me to different bloggers who have posted about the events or written race reports from past events would be great to see."

I couldn't agree more. There's a ton of interesting, relevant content out there in the cloud that would add value to search. We're working now to implement this feature, pulling in photos from flickr, videos from youtube, tweets from twitter and blog posts from technorati (a blog search engine).

update: we've just rolled out integration to Twitter, Flickr and Youtube!