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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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.
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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havi hoffman, March 16th, 2008 on 10:30 pm
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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Built for the most recent Yahoo! Hack Day, NewsGlobe is a fun new way to browse Yahoo! News Top Stories. It pulls together two existing Yahoo! services and takes advantage of the performance enhancements in the latest Adobe Flash Player.
The NewsGlobe consists of three basic pieces: a Yahoo! News Top Stories RSS feed, a geo-encoding web service from Yahoo! Maps, and a free, open-source library of 3D classes for ActionScript 3 called Papervision3D. The application loads the Yahoo! News RSS feed every few minutes and extracts the dateline for each story. It sends this descriptive textual information to the Maps service to find a matching location and thereby return a latitude/longitude coordinate. Then it's simply a matter of using the 3D classes in ActionScript to create a visually engaging experience that's either automated or interactive.
Papervision3D makes it incredibly easy to create a 3D scene, add 3D objects to it, and specify where the camera (i.e., the user's viewpoint) should be located. For each story location where we could discern a lat-long coordinate, we draw a marker object and place it in the proper position on a sphere representing the Earth. The display is calculated and drawn in real time. This allows us to animate the view over time and even let the user change the view by interacting with the objects in the scene.
Since the final product itself is a SWF file, NewsGlobe works online as a web application or off -network as a scaled-down, embedded customizable badge. It could easily be integrated into a Yahoo! Widget or packaged as an Adobe AIR application to run locally on the desktop. By passing in different RSS feeds or search terms, it'd be possible to filter the news and watch stories occurring in a specific part of the world, from a particular category, or matching other keywords.
Who built it
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What's next? This isn't a rhetorical question: after today's release of the Yahoo! ActionScript 3 Maps API , it's a question we feel we can ask. With a native ActionScript 3 mapping engine, map control widgets, geocoding, local search APIs, and custom markers and overlays, what can possibly be next? And the answer is simple: whatever you build with it!
The new component is very lightweight (base size is 30Kb), yet incredibly functional, easy to use and opens up a number of the other geo-centric web-services we have at Yahoo!, making it easy to develop overlays and components that build on top of the API in any of your Flash, Flex, AIR or Ajax applications.
To give you an idea of its functionality, during the development of the new API, Jonathan New and Benjamin Halsted of the Yahoo! Messenger team hacked up a really cool flick-able and rotatable map interface for our internal Q2/07 Hack Day, and won for the most fun hack! You can check out their flickable maps hack right here. Try to toss the map around, and shift-drag to rotate around the center. Special thanks go out to them for making such an awesome app.
If you have some Flex or ActionScript development chops, definitely jump in on the fray and grab a copy of the AS3 Maps API for yourself. We've prepared a few screencasts, examples and complete documentation to get you started, and we look forward to feedback.
I would also like to thank a number of people that made this release possible. First, everyone on the Yahoo! Maps and Flash Platform teams, past and present, including Mark Law, Rodney Fernandez and Allen Rabinovich. Huge thanks also go out to Lawrence Morrisroe, Buck DeFore, Ted Patrick, Eddie Babcock, Randy Troppmann, Chuck Freedman, Aaron King, and JR Conlin. Whew.
Popularity: 23% [?]
Zach Graves, February 11th, 2008 on 6:00 am
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