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.
The ski season is slowly winding down, so I’ve had some extra time to work on the API! 
(Ok, maybe one more trip to Heavenly…)
The initial response to the developer preview of Y! Live’s API has been fantastic, and we’ve gotten a ton of great feedback from all of you. We’ve made some changes to the API in response to the things we’ve heard - here are the changes going live late tonight Thursday, March 20th:
- JSON Callback support. When making JSON requests, you can add an optional “callback” parameter to have the output of your request call a Javascript function of your choosing. This helps avoid cross-browser request restrictions. Read more about this parameter on developer.yahoo.com.
- Sorting on the /channel/PERMALINK/broadcasts request. You can now send an optional “sort” parameter with values of ‘recent’, ‘popular’, or ‘random’ to this request to get broadcasts for a specific channel in an order other than oldest first.
- Resource ID type. Due to some internal shuffling, resource ids are now explicitly strings. The only apps that will be affected are ones that are written in a strongly typed language and cast the id fields as integers. Most apps should require no code changes.
Please remember that the API is currently pre-1.0. This kind of feedback is exactly what we’re looking for as we approach a nailed down v1.0 of the API. So please continue to send us feedback/suggestions/complaints about the API to ylive-contact (at) yahoo-inc (dot) com.
Happy hacking!
