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: 25% [?]
Chad Dickerson, April 22nd, 2008 on 11:40 am
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.
Popularity: 49% [?]
havi hoffman, March 16th, 2008 on 10:30 pm
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.
Popularity: 27% [?]
Today we’re happy 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. Want to broadcast your life? DJ a live set to a remote audience? Broadcast a nightclub vibe to the Web? Build a video speed dating application? We’ve created a website and an API that lets you do all these things and many more.
For viewers: How is Y! Live different from other online video sites? That’s simple: it’s live. What you’re watching, right now, is what other people are watching, right now. We wanted to create an experience that takes us back to live television, where things are happening now, in real time.
For broadcasters: You’ve been posting your stuff to MySpace and YouTube. Now, connect with your fans in real time on Y! Live. There is something intangible about a live performance – an excitement that you can’t replicate in pre-recorded format. Broadcast a performance, interact with your fans with video and chat, embed your broadcast anywhere - it’s all possible on Y! Live.
For developers: Check out the developer preview of our API and embeddable components, as well as a sample app and tutorial we threw together.
We’re looking for your feedback at this point, and will be incorporating it as we get to version 1.0 of our API in the coming months. Play around with it and 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.
Keep in mind that Y! Live is an experimental release. The Advanced Products team is a small incubation team at Yahoo! – our mission is to build stuff and launch it quickly, and respond to market feedback. Y! Live is 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 , follow our twitter feed, and check out the blog to stay with the conversation.
Special thanks to JT the Bigga Figga of Mandatory Business and Ricky Montalvo putting that Y! Live intro video together. And big props to the Y! Live team: Eric, Matt, Keith, David, and Premshree - these guys seriously cranked to get this thing built and launched in six months.
Michael Quoc
Director, Advanced Products
Popularity: 18% [?]
Michael Quoc, February 7th, 2008 on 5:45 am
Recently, we've been hosting the NASA CoLab Luna Philosophie talk series at Brickhouse in San Francisco. It's a public conversation between NASA thought leaders and top scientists and the community: "Anyone who is interested in an open, creative dialogue on human, space related topics is encouraged to attend!"
The second NASA CoLab@Brickhouse session took place earlier this month. Tom Cochrane of NASA Ames discussed his most recent project, Virtual Reality System Engineering Environments for the Space Program. He reflected on his lengthy career -- 25 years of using ever more powerful technology to engineer complex simulation models ranging from ground water movement to space flight.
Building on the tradition of SimCity and SimEarth, Tom and his team at NASA Ames have built SimStation, SpaceStation:SIM, and SimCEV. These are virtual environments for browsing and understanding real human space flight systems environments. The team is currently developing SimConstellation, a viewer that will support NASA's plans to return to the moon.
Unlike Sim games from Maxis, NASA simulations are mission critical: if the engineers get it wrong, the astronauts don’t come back. The simulations monitor oxygen levels, rocket fuel, and a range of other factors to accurately replicate what’s supposed to happen. You can drill into each phase of the mission and rotate the views to see exactly what’s going on inside the craft.
This degree of complexity is extraordinary. For instance, in order to land on a particular spot on the moon, the spacecraft has to orbit the moon in a particular orbit. To achieve that orbit, it must get onto a precise space trajectory out of earth’s atmosphere, and for that the craft must launch from a particular spot, at a particular speed. And that’s just for modeling orientation...
One memorable quote from Tom: “I remember being a brat on the Apollo program – they did all their documentation using typewriters and carbon paper.”
Decades later, Tom and his team have built an entire environment that generates simulations. An environment that's light-years beyond what you could visualize with a typewriter.
Thanks to Ricky Montalvo for his high-quality video of the talk. Watch it here:
Video by Ricky Montalvo, Yahoo! Developer Network, Total runtime 59min:33sec
Popularity: 12% [?]
Salim Ismail, January 30th, 2008 on 7:45 am
Who We Are
Search
Stay Connected
Recent Posts
Next* Links
Our Community
When / Where
About Next*
