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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:

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On Monday, we went to Adobe Engage at the Dogpatch Studios in San Francisco. Billed as “Adobe's annual conversation on the future of applications and the web” – this gathering of “key thought leaders and influencers” was also a coming out party for Adobe AIR, which officially launched on the same day.

AIR allows web developers to package up existing web apps or Flash movies as full fledged desktop applications. The AIR runtime must be installed on a user's machine, but once in place – the same AIR app will run on Windows or a Mac, and a Linux implementation is due out soon.

Robert Scoble was at the front, live streaming the event from his cellphone via qik.com and his archived content provides an interesting bird's-eye view of the event. After introductory messages from Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen and CTO Kevin Lynch, Adobe handed things off and let several different companies share the work they’ve been doing with AIR over the past year.

We saw a variety of cool apps, but perhaps more interesting were the types of teams that have been building them. Most of the AIR apps presented at Engage came from very small teams - internal propellerheads given the freedom to experiment and play in a very small corner of their organizations, all of whom have been attracted to using Flex and AIR. Even the names of these teams were telling: Yahoo's Media Innovation and Advanced Products groups met up with participants from the “Disruptive Innovation Group” at EBay, the Research Development team at the New York Times, and the NASDAQ Research group, to name some of the teams.

Yahoo! presented 3 apps. The first was a News Minibar application which we originally developed in AS2, wrapped in AS3, and converted into an AIR application. It sits on your desktop and keeps you up to date with weather, stock prices, and newsfeeds of your choice. We also released an updated beta version of our Blog Remix app, which lets you remix different music blog posts together and export them via HTML to your blog.

Our Yahoo! Live demo included a personal shout to the audience at Engage from music artist Tilly Key via her Y! Live page. Things got interesting when people watching Tilly’s page realized they were able to enter live comments that would appear in real time in front of the audience at Engage, but by that time Live product manager Michael Quoc had moved on. He was showing some of the cool mashups that external developers have already built using the Y! Live APIs. During the Q&A session afterwards, someone commented that we had “guts to show something like this with wifi, and all the other craziness..."

In all, the Engage event provided an early peek at interesting new technology and applications in 2008. Apparently many people (and companies) seem to agree that for building innovative software, less is more. As a developer on a small team in a big company, it’s great to see platforms emerge that allow small teams to build great things, “upon the shoulders of giants.”

Adobe Engage 2008 about to begin photo by Kendall Whitehouse.

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Vibes is a social experiment tracking the flow of kindness across the world. Do you have a friend with the flu? A brother or sister with a big job interview tomorrow? Or do you just want to let someone know you're thinking of them?

Send them some good vibes, and watch in real time as people across the world share their kindness.

Who built it

• Matt Kozlov
• Lawrence Morrisroe
• Zach Graves

How do I get it

Vibes is a Facebook app. You must be a logged in Facebook user to add the Vibes application. If you're already using Facebook, you can grab the app here.

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“How much kindness is there in the world?” I asked myself one morning as I showered (my best inner-monologues take place in the shower). “Can it be measured? Does it change hour by hour? Season to season? City to city?”

“Every day,” I thought, while shampooing, “people send one another IMs, text messages, emails, comment on each other’s MySpace profiles, and write on each other’s Facebook walls, leaving affirmations of friendship, love, and support. It’s disorganized now, but let’s try to channel, visualize, and measure it.”

The Apps Studio team agreed that this was a pretty cool idea, and thus was born Vibes (an application initially for Facebook). We describe Vibes as a social experiment tracking the flow of kindness across the world. Have a friend with the flu? A brother or sister with a big job interview tomorrow? Or do you just want to let someone know you're thinking of them? Send them some good vibes, and watch in real time as people across the world share their kindness.

The Apps Studio is a small, new tiger team committed to building best-in-class social applications for Yahoo!, sometimes extending existing Yahoo! services and sometimes creating entirely new ones (like Vibes). When my mom used to cook, her guiding principal was “everything’s better with cheese.” When the Apps Studio cooks up new apps, our guiding principal is “everything’s better with friends.”

We are very excited by the recent advances in social application platforms and the types of new online experiences they allow. Our goal is to bring your favorite Yahoo! products to you and your friends, wherever you all may be.

So, we hope you’ll check out Vibes and send a few to your friends. Stay tuned for more from our team.

P.S. At the time of this writing L.A. and S.F. seem to be the kindest cities. East Coast, consider that a challenge.

Scuba diving aftermath photo by Delgoff.

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Editor's note: MyBlogLog API - Q & A with guest blogger Jon Henshaw
Editor's note: Introducing Jon Henshaw, Internet Strategist at Sitening, a Nashville-based Web development and search marketing company, makers of the Raven SEO Tool Set. He's responsible for driving exposure and traffic to his clients' websites via social networks and search engines. He first discovered MyBlogLog last year and has been using it on every blog he manages ever since.

Last month, as soon as he heard about it, Jon signed up for the MyBlogLog API beta. A week ago, we got a tip about this cool WordPress plugin built by the team at Sitening. Please keep in mind that for now these plugins only work if you've got a Yahoo! API key that's been permissioned for the MyBlogLog API beta. If you're interested in trying it out, please apply to the beta at developer.yahoo.com/mybloglog or hang in there just a little longer. The API will be available to everyone in March.

Q: Out of all of the social media APIs that are available, why did you choose to work with the MyBlogLog API?

A: I've always had an affinity for MyBlogLog, because it solves two difficult marketing problems – getting exposure and networking within your niche. Since MyBlogLog already does a good job addressing both of those problems, I was excited when I heard they were coming out with an API and I immediately started thinking about ways we could extend their service.

Q: Is the WordPress plugin the first thing you made with the MyBlogLog API?

A: No, initially we used their API to build some custom pages for our blog. We wanted to implement the API to give us a way to promote and thank our Raven MyBlogLog members. During the process, we wrote our own PHP Wrapper for the MyBlogLog API and turned it into an open source project. The wrapper makes it much easier for PHP developers to quickly build Web applications with the MyBlogLog API. Then we decided to take it further and used our wrapper to create the WordPress plugin.

Q: How does the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin extend or benefit your blog?

A: We believe that Raven's community is essential to the success of our blog. So we used the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin to celebrate and thank the readers and customers who contribute most to the conversation. Our plugin displays a widget with the most active MyBlogLog members, creates a members' list page, and also creates a detailed member profile page. The profile page was especially fun to make, because we took several of the social networks that members belonged to – all stored in their MyBlogLog profile – and retrieved and displayed their recent posts and social bookmarks on it. We also listed their blogs and other related information. So far, the response from our members has been very positive.

Popularity: 30% [?]