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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!

Popularity: 64% [?]

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.

Popularity: 70% [?]

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.

Popularity: 44% [?]