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Over the past couple of months, we've been quietly working at Brickhouse and focusing on what matters most: delivering delightful new products. In February and March, the teams at Brickhouse were busy shipping Yahoo! Live (which launched on February 7) and Fire Eagle (launched March 5). Both are thriving in their early days.

Yahoo! Live, our experiment in social broadcasting, has been blowing the doors off, hitting over a million users in its first few weeks. We've featured broadcasters ranging from rock stars (Motley Crue) to well-known DJs (Paul Oakenfold at the Winter Music Conference) to emerging stars like Sheena Melwani. Yahoo! Live can be purely entertaining, but it also touches people's lives in wonderfully unexpected ways. Just as one example, the deaf community quickly discovered Live and created the DeafRead channel, which has become an all-hours gathering spot for signing and chatting (reading this testimonial really warmed my heart). Yahoo! Live has become a truly meaningful "third place" for all types of social interactions. With a full-featured developer API, developers can build their own experiences around the Live platform, too.

Fire Eagle launched as an invite-only developer beta barely six weeks ago and is building momentum as we move towards a general release (request an invite at the Fire Eagle home page). On the day we launched, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb wrote: "Standards based platform plus strong privacy equals the best scenario I can imagine for a location tracking service. We'll see what kinds of innovative applications get built on top of it." Well, the developer community has responded with enthusiasm and new applications are emerging regularly. If you have an invite, you can already leverage Fire Eagle in a growing gallery of applications including Dopplr, Firebot, Dashboard widgets for OS X (dmg file), Loki toolbar for IE/Firefox, a Movable Type plugin, Navizon, Wikinear, and ZoneTag. Aside from the applications listed in our gallery, many other developer partners have integrated with Fire Eagle or will be integrating soon: Plazes, Outside.in (details here), Lightpole, Rummble, plus many more in the pipeline. If you would like to become a Fire Eagle developer, join the developer group.

We're excited about Yahoo! Live and Fire Eagle, and this week's Web 2.0 Expo (taking place just down the street from us at Brickhouse in San Francisco) gives us the perfect opportunity to thank the communities who have helped these projects do so well in their first several weeks, so we're throwing a party in the Brickhouse space as part of the "South Park Crawl." Just RSVP on Upcoming or show us your Web 2.0 Expo pass to get in. The Fire Eagle and Live teams will be on hand and we'll have loads of Fire Eagle invites, a couple of our favorite DJs from Yahoo! Live, and plenty of beer. Be sure to use Fireball "Web 2.0 Expo edition" (a Fire Eagle / Twitter / Upcoming app that just launched last night!) to find out where your friends are during the show.

Thank you for using Fire Eagle and Yahoo! Live, and see you at the party!

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