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Last week, the Fire Eagle development team hosted an informal evening meetup at Yahoo!'s Brickhouse office to share news about Fire Eagle, a system that brokers location information and helps users safely share information about their location with sites, services and people on the Internet. Fire Eagle launched at ETech earlier this month.

In this video, Tom Coates describes some of the first Fire Eagle apps that are emerging, like an integration with Dopplr and a plugin for Movable Type, and shares ideas and imaginings for new location-aware services.

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Yahoo! Developer Network evangelist Jeremy Zawodny spoke with Paul Donnelly from the Pipes team about the new Pipes badges that launched today. A badge is a simple way to display the output of your favorite Yahoo! Pipe on your website or blog.

There are three types of Pipes badges you can add like widgets to your webpage or blog: the map badge, when there's geocoded data; an image badge that includes slideshow functionality; and a list badge, for all other valid data. Help us spot the first generation of creative Pipes badges out in the wild, by posting your badge sightings and URLs in comments here. Read more about this release or watch this video introduction:

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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.

Fire Eagle plugin for Movable Type

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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I'm here at ETech in San Diego where Tom Coates from Brickhouse has just announced the long-awaited release of Fire Eagle. This developer's beta is now open by invitation.

Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way for anyone to share their location with sites and services online. We want to make the whole web respond to where you are, and to help you discover more about the world around you, whether you're in Berkeley or Ulaan Bataar.

If you're a developer or geo-hacker who wants to start building an application powered by Fire Eagle, please come join our developer group and check out the documentation on the Yahoo! Developer Network.

And if you want to learn more about Fire Eagle and how it came about, here's a video of Tom's presentation:

Popularity: 45% [?]

Keep an eye out for Yahoos in San Diego this week -- at the O'Reilly ETech 2008 conference (March 3-6) and the adjacent Graphing Social Patterns West:The Business and Technology of Social Networking Platforms (March 3-4).

On Monday at 1:15pm, Ian Kennedy will introduce Yahoo!'s MyBlogLog API: A Social Network Lookup Service in San Diego Ballroom B. At 1:30pm, he'll join panelists from Google, FriendFeed, Six Apart, and mSpoke, to discuss Social Networks and the Need for Feeds.

Meantime, over at ETech, food-hacker and engineer Marc Powell will present a tutorial called Kitchen Hack Lab in Marina Ballroom E at 1:30pm.

On Tuesday at 11:50am, in Marina Ballroom D, Elizabeth Churchill, from Yahoo! Research, will give a talk titled Users, Socializers, and Producers: How Internet Technologies are Changing Our View of Ourselves.

Stay tuned for later in the week; we've got something mythic in the works.

The Yahoo! Developer Network is sponsoring both these events. You'll know us by our mugs at the GSP Monday morning coffee break, at ETech we'll be at Booth #9. Stop by and say hello if you're in town, otherwise, check in at the Yahoo! Developer Network theater for ongoing video highlights, interviews, and coverage from GSP and ETech.

Yahoo! Developer Network Mixer photo by Jeff Kubina (2006).

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