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!
Archive for the 'announcements' Category
29
Oct
Programming Note
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.
16
Jul
Amnesty
We made Yahoo! Live so people could have fun with their cameras. Different people have different ideas of fun, and that’s cool, but some things are never fun in our book. These things include, but are not limited to, racism, harassment, porn, violence, and anything illegal. We just can’t tolerate that stuff on Yahoo! Live, and we’re certainly not providing the service for that. We’re going to blacklist and ban people who we think are making it difficult for others to be on the site.
That said, some of you who are currently blacklisted may want to keep using Live with your friends more than you want to keep doing that stuff. If that’s the case, send an email to ylive at yahoogroups.com, with contact info (IM or phone, no email please), and we’d be happy to get in touch for a chat.
Don’t forget to join us at 3 PST for the town hall!
Y! Live’s first night was quite a ride. We had some killer performances from JT the Bigga Figga, Sheena Melwani, David Choi, Tilly Key, DJ Buzzkill and more - props to all of you, we all had a blast hanging out with you!
We also saw our site go through some intermittent outages as traffic surged late into the evening. We’ve been researching it and have identified some key improvements we need to make to make the site run more smoothly - we’re working hard to implement those now. We hope to have the site up and running much more smoothly in the morning.
One thing to keep in mind is that although this product comes from Yahoo! (a big company), the team working on Y! Live is only six people deep. We’re a really tiny incubation group which is tasked with building innovative new products and get them out there ASAP. Our mantra is to iterate and build with the community, as opposed to unveiling The Next Big Thing on Day One. We hope you collaborate with us as we shape Y! Live into a game-changing product.
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.
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 our developer preview of our API and embeddable components, and 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-contact (at] yahoo-inc (dot] com, and follow our twitter feed to hear about headline broadcasts and notable things happening live.
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
