That’s it kiddos, end of the road.
It’s hard to put into words the impact that Y! Live had for all of us. What started out as an experiment in live broadcasting, resulted in not only some revolutionary moments, but some pretty funny ones as well.
If there is one thing that I love about the social web, is its ability that it has to bring people together. We have been lucky enough to act as a platform for countless stories of love and friendship that might have never began if not for Y! Live. Heartbreaks, laughter and battles all played out, in real time, live, streaming to the world, in front of everyone to see.
I want to thank you all so much for sharing your lives with us, and making these last 9 months totally epic. I speak for the entire gang when I say that this project will be truly be missed, and as for myself, I want everyone involved to know how honored I feel to have been lucky enough to be a part of this experience.
So with that, I encourage you to take a stroll down memory lane and look back on Y! Live, NAO!
Our mission here on the Brickhouse team is to quickly develop product ideas that can add value to Yahoo! as a whole. To do this effectively we constantly evaluate our early-stage products and sometimes have to make the hard decision to move on, in order to continue exploring new territory and developing new products.
So it is with great sadness that I share the news that Yahoo! Live, a Brickhouse project in social broadcasting will be going off the air on 3 December 2008. We’d like to thank everyone who has participated. Without all of you, Y!Live would not have built the strong community that it has. It has been really interesting (and entertaining) to see all of the ways broadcasters have used Live, developing it into a place for all sorts of social interactions.
We hope you can join us in our town hall this Wednesday to toast Yahoo! Live. For more out of Brickhouse, check out the recently launched fire eagle, and keep an eye on next* to stay posted on what we’re doing next.
Apologies for the short notice, but there will be no town hall today.
Stay tuned though, we’ll be back next Wednesday at 3 o’clock.
See you then!
Heya BBS!
Today is indeed bittersweet for your dear Tilly. As many of you heard during the TownHall, today is going to be my last day helping out with the Y! Live community.
These last few months have been not only magical, but I would say they could be considered the best 3 months of my life. I will carry the memories and moments we shared together deep in my heart, and cherish each and every one of you as a the unique and special snowflakes that you are.
Recently I was approached with the opportunity to pursue my real passion, researching and developing a way for unicorns to live in the vacuum of space. This, on top of starting up the national stadium tour for my christian death metal band’s new album “Jesus Rides the Dinosaur”, and maintaining my farm of mudkips, it felt like the right time for me to spread my wings and adventure new options.
Not to fear, my precious, you are not alone. In my absence, our comrade Angela will be your liaison to the Y! Live team, as well as the go to girl for any concerns you may have regarding the community. Please be kind to her, and act as the respectable and classy citizens that you always have.
In closing, I feel the need to share with you one of the more beloved and treasured moments that I experienced here during my time with Y! Live. I can remember it like it was yesterday. Imagine if you will a full moon without a cloud in the sky, working late at the Brickhouse office when all of a sudden the lights went out. In a panic, the first person I turned to was Eric Fixler. His words that day will stay in my mind forever. “You’re movin’ with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air.” I whistled for a cab and when it came near The license plate said fresh and it had dice in the mirror. If anything I could say that this cab was rare, but I thought, “Nah, forget it. Yo, holmes to Bel-Air!” I pulled up to the house about 7 or 8 and I yelled to the cabbie, “Yo holmes smell ya later!” Looked at my kingdom I was finally there, to sit on my throne as the prince of Bel-Air.
We get lots of feature requests from people who want more control over who can chat in their channel. Today we started releasing new capabilities to address this.
- Ignore: Don’t want to see someone’s messages? Ignore them.
- Mute: Don’t want anyone to see someone’s messages in your channel? Mute them.
You can ignore or mute people by clicking on their name in the Who’s Here list, using the menu that pops up. You can ignore anyone you want at any time (if you’re logged in); muting is only for channel owners, in your channel.
You can manage your muted and ignored people just like Favorites: hit the Settings link in the top menu bar.
We also added a new way of using chat that only lets the people you pick chat in your channel. We’re calling these people VIPs. You can add or remove VIPs from inside your channel, or from Settings.
All new Yahoo! Live channels will be in VIP-only mode by default. If you want to make your chat room open to all, VIP-only, or close it entirely, you can do it in Settings.
For more info about VIPs, check the cheatsheet.
Just for the the record, we also added some more colors to chat messages, and made chat scrollback less infuriating. We’ll be refining these features over the next few weeks; let us know what you think in the comments.
Due to some scheduling conflicts the Y! Live townhall has postponed for this week. But fear not! We will be back on, Wednesday, August 20th @ 3:00pm
Later Gators!
…to accomodate an event at the office. See you there at 3:30!
There’s been a lot of discussion lately surrounding the Popular Channels on Y!Live, and what many of the Y!Live users are interpreting as “blacklisting”. We thought we’d try to clarify a few things, and give some pointers as to how you can have your broadcast show up in the popular listings. For starters, we’re not blacklisting people. However, for users who have been banned for behavior that does not fit with our TOS, we’re not just automatically allowing them to show up in the site listings. That doesn’t mean that your broadcast isn’t live, or that people can’t chat in your channel, it just means that we’re not advertising your broadcast. Here’s some thoughts from the Y!Live team around “what broadcasts are likely to stay in the popular listings and what will most likely result in not showing up in listings or being banned”. We want everyone to have fun, and what some people consider fun, others consider not.
Things to do to show up on the Popular Listings Page
- Do something interesting:
- Broadcast your job (radio DJs, restaurant)
- Broadcast a road trip
- Broadcast an interesting view (a skyline, a zoo)
- Come up with original content:
- A puppet show
- A talk show
- Singing, acting, etc.
- Have a debate with someone
- Review music or TV shows or movies
- Surprise us!
Reasons you won’t show up on the Popular Listings Page (and/or get “Blacklisted” or Banned)
- Just coming up with channels to attack
- Going into channels with the express purpose of abusing the broadcaster
- Sitting around talking about fapping
- Just broadcasting someone else’s material (TV, movie)
- Porn
- Showing parts
- Demanding other people show parts
- Sitting around trying to do things for “teh lulz”
- Using language that you know isn’t appropriate (the N-word, etc.)
- Naming your channel or username to be things that you know isn’t appropriate
- Encouraging behavior from other users that will lead to things on this list
At this time, we can’t respond to requests to be included in the listings. However, we are watching the site, and channels that meet the above criteria will get restored to the listings.
Now maybe the things listed in the “how to show up on the popular listings page” sound boring to you. But the reason we came up with the idea of Y!Live and the ability to broadcast yourself was so people could showcase what they’re doing, or seeing, to an audience.
We appreciate that some of you just want a forum for hanging out with your friends and talking smack. That’s just fine (so long as it doesn’t violate the TOS to the point where we need to ban you). But that’s not likely going to get you up in the popular listings screen.
Think of it like the difference between “The Office” and something on cable access. Not hating on cable access, just sayin’.
PS - Our “townhall” is tomorrow at 3pm Pacific Time in the LiveNao channel: http://live.yahoo.com/livenao
Put together by our own Cool Keith T. Thanks!
I feel like the latest Y! Live Townhall session might have been my favorite so far! Not only did we get some more really great feedback from you guys, but we also got to play with puppies and go on a small tour of the office! If you didn’t make it this week, you totally missed out! But don’t worry; let me recap what we went over.
The first thing we should get out of the way is the Null error issue. That should be all jet set now, the team launched a fix for that bug so you shouldn’t be seeing that message pop up at you anymore. If you do come across it, please let the team know and they can squash it.
And now for some of the fun suggestions that you guys brought up! I especially loved the idea about maybe designing custom interface skins and adding in emoticons! It also sounds like people are requesting that we add more windows into the viewer’s tray? Cool idea, but if we did that, it would take up a whole bunch of resource for your computer and become a total bandwidth hog.
We also gave you the offer this week that if you start broadcasting a really cool show, we will give you free goodies! Just drop us a line (ylive at yahoogroups.com) and let us know the date and time you were planning on going live and the type of content your going to broadcast, and we will check it out and send you an item from our super hot Summer ‘08 Y! Live clothing line!
See you guys next week!
