Earlier this week, we rolled out a new feature which enables you as a broadcaster to temporarily turn off your chat room. Why would you do this? Well, as some of you more popular broadcasters know, things can get a little crazy when there are hundreds of people trying to talk at once. This feature will enable you to at least broadcast in peace momentarily while things settle down a bit. All you need to do is click the “Disable Chat” button in your Broadcast Control Panel, then click it again once you want to restart your chat. We’re working on additional features which will give you more granular control of your channel, but we thought you’d appreciate this tool in the meantime. As always, we’d love your feedback, so please leave your comments on this blog.

Wanted to also give a shout out to the Y! Live engineering team (you can see the team roster over in the right column of this blog). They’ve been working hard on some major nuts and bolts improvements to our streaming and communications infrastructure. Most of this is behind-the-scenes work you don’t see, but it’s critical stuff that will help keep the site running smoothly as it grows. We’re looking forward to soon being able to shift our focus to bringing you some brand new features which you can actually touch and feel and teach new tricks and stuff - so stay tuned!