I thought it’d be fun to sit down with Ty (CEO & Founder) and quiz him a bit about his background, learn more about his vision for FanFeedr and get his take on the changing sports media landscape. Below is our conversation. I think you’ll find that Ty’s unique product and perspective are going to have a positive impact on how we all consume sports information.

What is FanFeedr – what’s the general concept and what are you trying to accomplish?

We are a real-time personalized sports aggregator. In a nutshell, that means that we want to connect casual and the more, dedicated, shall we say, sports fans with the teams and players that they care about the most AND we want them to be able to talk to their friends about their passions.

Where did the idea for FanFeedr come from?

I am passionate about music and sports, in no particular order, and it occurred to me that surfing five, six and seven sites a day to try and get information about the players and teams that I am passionate about didn’t make much sense. I think the same problem exists for music. Additionally, I have grown less and less interested in wading through presentational layers (e.g. the top story of the day) to get to the stuff that is personally relevant or that my friends are doing

Can you give us a little background on yourself? I know you worked for Viacom and helped build MTV.com, but can give our readers some more info on what you did there and how it got you to this point.

I grew up in the SF Bay Area, went to school in Philadelphia, and started work out of college as a visual journalist at the New York Times. Because I was younger and could run fast, I got all of the death and destruction stuff like the LA Riots; Waco, TX; the Oklahoma City bombing; the Cambodian elections in 1992, and so on. Rather than continue to cover the newly emerging fields of the world wide web, as I was doing in 1995, I decided to actually create stuff.

I moved back to San Francisco and started working in the Valley as the Creative Director of Excite@Home (nee @Home Networks) for three years, creating the world’s first three broadband portals with my talented staff. I took a year off to go to cooking school in London (no, it wasn’t British food, cease the chuckling.)

I came back to the Valley for two years, developing interactive television applications for TV Works (nee MetaTV), took off some more time to go snowboarding for nine months in Lake Tahoe, and then joined Comcast in Philly. I did business development there, signing wireless, travel, and dating deals for the broadband portal, and then moved back into Product Development for the cable television group.

And then on to Viacom, rebuilding MTV.com and rolling out social features with my smart team across the Music and Logo group.

As an entrepreneur, what is your favorite part of building FanFeedr.com?

My favorite part of the effort is changing the product based on user feedback, and making sure that we are serving both our 80% customers (the casual sports fan) and our 20% customers, the dedicated sports fans. People who eat Yankees or RedSox cereal for example.

Refer to the scene in “No Country for Old Men” when Frances McDormand shows her, uh, dedication to her team of choice. We want to enable those people, in all senses of the word.

What interests you most about fans and their use of technology today? Do you think technology could ever have a negative impact on the way fans experience the game?

The use of Twitter by athletes in college and in the pros is probably the biggest deal at the moment, given the asymmetrical friending model employed by that service and the league uncertainty of how to mediate an unmediated dialogue. I don’t think that technology can go too far, as long as it enhances the entertainment value, because, at the end of the day, sports is an entertainment medium, in addition to being a very large business.

There’s been so much chatter about pro sports and Twitter lately; Do you have any underlying thoughts on this? Should NFL players be allowed to tweet? What about journalists who are on location at team practices?

I have no issue with athletes or coaches tweeting, at any time, and not just because I value it through FanFeedr. Tweeting is the spoken word delivered through electronic distribution. The only reason NFL players are muted in the lead-up to a commercial break, or on the field, is because they might let loose with a curse word. If you see an athlete saying “Hi Mom” by lip reading, or saying “I am amazing” when he scores a touchdown, it seems irrelevant to try and constrain them from typing the same thing. One could argue that it would distract them from the game, but I see athletes whiling away their time on the bench and during timeouts with the opposite of focus.

What is the value in real-time news for sports?

Sports is a soap opera. There are usually an antagonist and protagonist, depending on your point of view, and there is a measurable outcome that normal people besides me would call a “winner.” With that in mind, providing a real-time view of the sentiments around that struggle, pro or con, is extremely valuable, because sports, like news, is highly perishable, and we want to know what is going on now. A friend of mine has the DirecTV package for the NFL, with a channel called “RedZone.” It is, as you would expect NOTHING BUT TEAMS ON SUNDAY IN THE END ZONE. I was baffled two years ago, but it became the equivalent of heli-skiing: highly entertaining, and addictive (we will leave cost out of the equation for now.)

Do you think tools like FanFeedr will cause fans to become more hardcore or just allow them to get the exact information they want in a quicker way?

I don’t know. Users of the site will determine where the site evolves. I simply want to give them the tools to make their sports consumption easier and more timely, and to model to things they are already trying to do (but lack to the tools to execute.)

Please join me in welcoming FanFeedr to the neighborhood. For more info and updates be sure to follow them on Twitter.

This article is copyright © 2012