Wow, this is great news from the team behind one of my favorite websites, FootyTube. In a recent article by Steve Wilson of The Telegraph (UK), FootyTube was named one of the top 25 football sites on the web, despite still being in beta. My many congratulations for all of the hard work! It’s finally starting to pay off.

There are of course a couple of other good spots on the list. Two of my other “must read on a daily basis” tips would be Soccernet, closely followed by BBC Football. You can also read what Lee of FootyTube thoughts are on the list, and what he feel was missed.

A site I didn’t know about, which I found through Lee’s post is Footballfilter, it’s sort of a popurls-clone, a mashup but with football sources only. Being a frequent flyer of the iPhone, I have to give Footballfilter credit for the Instapaper integration (hover over an article and check the right-hand side) as well as the use of RPX (OpenID and data portability). This is the way to go and I love it!

About Footballfilter

FootballFilter is a compilation of the best Football* content available on the internet, including news, blogs, forums, pictures, videos and podcasts. All content is updated automatically so you can quickly scan all the latest stories that are appearing on the web. You can read a summary of each news item by hovering your mouse over the text. To read the full article just click on the link.

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Oh and, here you go Lee. Let me know if you need an even ‘better’ one!

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Closed systems are at the mercy of their creator having guessed at the optimal solution.

- Dick Costello

Before I knew about the top 25 mentioning, this post was going to be on openfooty, FootyTube’s own API (featured below) which is currently in a closed beta.

Introducing openfooty from ofproject on Vimeo.

As of now, openfooty promises to be the most advanced completely free football API available. It offers access to much of the data that powers FootyTube on a daily basis; including fixtures, league tables, team standings, player data, team news, and of course, video. From the sound of it, it sounds as if FootyTube will prevail in this space through opening up their data to developers – something I’m of course in favor of.

I hope it won’t be too long until FootyTube shows us what other fans, users, and developers have created with openfooty. Really looking forward to it!

Related posts:

1. Footytube 2.0 launch in November Today I stumbled across the news that Footytube, my personal...
2. Footytube 2.0 Some of you might have remember that I mentioned...

Some of you might have remember that I mentioned the footytube 2.0 beta a while back. Yesterday I got a very nice email from Lee over at footytube, inviting me to take the new version for a test run:

Heya,

A little while ago you signed up to the footytube 2.0 Private Beta.

We are delighted to announce that the beta is now ready, and we would be chuffed to bits if you wanted to come in and be amongst the first people to give it a spin.

I think footytube 2.0 was originally set to launch in November if I remember correctly, the message about the new platform has certainly been up there for a while now. Hopefully it means that they’ve not experienced serious complications, but that they’ve considered and tweaked forth and back for the best possible result.

I’ll have to say that I’m really impressed with the new platform and design at first glance. I haven’t had much time to try out the arsenal of functionality, but it looks beautiful! The first you’re met with is a video grid or ‘Zeitgeist’ which shows what footytube users fancy today. It seems that most functionality is driven by Ajax, something that makes the site clean, fast and easy to navigate. Footytube also seem to have glanced one or two times at YouTube (surprise surprise), ‘borrowing’ not only fractions of the name but also certain functionality. The mandatory widget with related, channels and popular videos are all there, what’s more surprising is perhaps the new added features (very cool!) such as the ‘community opinion on team performance’ and ‘nominate a goal for goal of the week’.

Focused on user interaction, easy navigation, and speed – I’ve no doubt that the new footytube will be a big success. A much cleaner layout and design will definitely help. All the best!

Related posts:

1. Footytube 2.0 launch in November Today I stumbled across the news that Footytube, my personal...
2. Footytube named among the top 25 football websites Wow, this is great news from the team behind...

Related posts:

1. Footytube named among the top 25 football websites Wow, this is great news from the team behind...
2. Footytube 2.0 Some of you might have remember that I mentioned...