Despite the unsettled weather, teams up at Yahoo's San Francisco Brickhouse office have been building and releasing interesting APIs associated with the cool products they've been launching these last couple months. Y! Live is an application that lets anyone create and broadcast their own real-time video experience – concert, conference, political rally, or live DJ set. Y! Live web services are open for you to display, hack, and mashup live video streams on your website or client app.
According to the documentation: "You can query our streaming servers to find people broadcasting on Yahoo! Live as well as information about those broadcasts and the people that are viewing them... Use this API to mashup broadcasters, coviewers, and anything else on the web that might be relevant."
That's just what Premasagar Rose did this weekend at Barcamp Brighton. He and some friends used Y! Live to stream sessions at the 48 hour unconference for " for designers, developers, geeks, social softies & ui freaks" on the south coast of England. After first using Y! Live last month at SemanticCamp in London, Premasagar and friends decided to add some "rudimentary group functionality" to the streamed conference experience. It's a great step forward for the socialization of Live! YLiveGroups is Greasemonkey script you can install in your Firefox browser. Then you see the names of the coviewers on a channel or a associated with a specific event displayed in the masthead at the top of the webpage where the player is streaming.
Live has been live for less than two months now, so it's exciting to see folks from the UK web community embrace and extend the social TV experiment.
Meantime, closer to home, Ben Trott, Six Apart co-founder and creator of Movable Type, has been hacking on the Fire Eagle APIs, released just over a week ago. Fire Eagle is a system that brokers location information, designed to help people safely share information about where on earth they are with sites, services and people on the Internet. Ben's hack is a Fire Eagle plugin that makes his Movable Type profile location-aware. He can map his current location and update location changes on his Action Stream. Also, other Movable Type plugins can build off of the FE location plugin to add new location-sensitive features.
To see Ben's plugin implemented with the Activity Stream, check out David Recordon's site. David is a tech guy at Six Apart and he got in touch because he wanted us to know about what they'd built lately with Fire Eagle.
If these bright new APIs can generate such early enthusiasm and propagate themselves among developers and tinkerers—then a Brickhouse spring must be just around the corner.
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Comment by Premasagar — March 17th, 2008 at 2:59 am
Cool. Thanks for shouting the YLiveGroups script.
We’re thinking about extending the script, now that BarCamp is over - to allow the ad hoc creation of groups, to ‘follow’ user channels, to ‘tag’ the currently viewed channel and to track particular tags…
[BTW - the first link to Y!Live in the post is broken]
Comment by havi — March 17th, 2008 at 6:42 am
@Premasagar - fixed the bad link, thank you! Please let us know as you extend the script, or tell us about other hacks you’re working on — especially if they related to APIs or services from Yahoo. Cheers.
Comment by coxy — March 18th, 2008 at 2:01 am
Shame Ben Trotts plugin uses Fire Eagle with Google Maps, and not Yahoo! Maps.
Comment by Premasagar — March 20th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
@havi - Sure thing. I’ll post a link here when we release the next update.
If you didn’t see it already, you might want to check out our HackHUD script from last year’s Yahoo Hack Day London.
It uses Yahoo’s YUI, Term Extraction and Pipes to overlay user media (Flickr photos, blog posts, tweets) on top of news events on the BBC News website:
http://dharmafly.com/blog/hackhud