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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On Tuesday, the YUI (Yahoo! User Interface) team celebrated their second anniversary of making life easier for front-end developers. The YUI is a set of JavaScript utilities and controls, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML, and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.
There were not quite simultaneous parties in London--in a dark West End pub, and in Sunnyvale--at Yahoo's HQ. YUI has fostered a dedicated, generous community of developers helping each other out and contributing knowledge and code to the project. The Sunnyvale party celebrated some of the heroes of this far-flung community. You'll find ample coverage on the YUI blog (thanks Eric!) and more good stuff on the Y! Developer Network blog.
Christian Heilmann is a Yahoo technology evangelist based in the U.K -- Christian started warming up for the festivities a week earlier, with a talk he delivered at GeekUp Leeds, a grassroots gathering of web developers in the north west of England. Christian's presentation takes a head-on approach to YUI's terrible twos with a compelling answer to the question, "Why the YUI?" (or furthermore, "why any library"). Watch for yourself:
You can follow along with the presentation, Y the YUI? over at slideshare.net.
Big thanks to Dominic Hodgson, and the folks from NorthCast, who documented Christian's presentation at Geekup Leeds, at the Old Broadcasting House, and gave us permission to distribute their video by embedding it here.
If you just want to see some party photos of 60 or 70 happy developers drinking beers in London ("in a dark and dingy pub so the lighting is rather moody"), here's a set for you:
YUI Library and YPattern Library Turn 2!
Some stunning photos of happy developers, this time from Sunnyvale, thanks to Dustin Diaz, who has generously let us use some of them in the "Who We Are" slideshow above on the right rail:
YUI 2nd Birthday
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havi hoffman, February 28th, 2008 on 8:30 am
We’re excited to share with you Yahoo! Live, a new experiment in live video from the Advanced Products team at Yahoo!. Y! Live was dreamed up as a way to make it possible for anyone to create their own live video experience. Broadcast the concert you’re at. Webcast your own live DJ set. Lifecast. Build your own live video speed dating application. We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more.
On Y! Live, you can use your webcam to broadcast your own live video channel. Or just tune in to other people’s channels. The video and audio are in real time, and as you watch someone’s channel or broadcast your own, you can interact chat-room style with other viewers.
There are limitless channels and anyone can be a star. Even if you don’t want to broadcast your own channel, you can still activate your webcam to broadcast while you’re viewing someone else’s channel.
If you're a developer, check out the developer preview of our API and embeddable components, as well as a sample app and quick tutorial.
We’re looking for your feedback, and we'll be incorporating it as we get to version 1.0 of our API in the coming months. Let us know what you think. We’re always interested in seeing what you’ve built, and we’ll feature cool stuff you build on our site.
Who built it
How do I get it
Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – Y! Live is currently a limited capacity release, so bear with us as and we may reach our limits in periods of high traffic. Our top priority now is to hear your feedback – send your comments to ylive@yahoogroups.com, and follow our twitter feed to hear about headline broadcasts and notable things happening live.
For more information on getting started, Click here.
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We’ve had some great speakers at Brickhouse and last week’s talk by Jeff Hammerbacher of Facebook, part of the 2008 HackHouse talk series, was no exception. Jeff is head of data and analytics at Facebook. He spoke about his role, what his team has accomplished, and some of the challenges they face.
It was standing room only, highly technical, and totally engaging. Jeff described what it’s like to manage unprecedented growth of highly sensitive user data in a challenging business environment ("we’re collecting tens of terabytes of data every day”). The team first tried a standard MySQL database, but quickly outgrew it, and had to devise unique ways of doing weblog analysis.
I was personally interested in how Facebook deals with constantly changing data elements – it’s very hard to track historical trends when the data is always changing. At Facebook, they’ve built custom analytics packages to handle this problem and intend to release some of it open-source. Go Jeff!
Special thanks to Nikhil Bobb, from the BravoNation team, for inviting Jeff to come in and present; and to Ricky Montalvo, from the Yahoo! Developer Network, for the video.
Total runtime: 1hr:11min
download (m4v)
Editor's note: Jeff Hammerbacher's presentation, The Facebook Data team: Infrastructure and insight is also available on Slideshare. Thanks Jeff!
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Salim Ismail, January 23rd, 2008 on 12:54 pm
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