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

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!

Thank you guys for another awesome Y! Live Town Hall session! Sorry this weeks broadcast was all choppy and full of lag. Turns out that the laptop we were running on (mine of course) was set to go through too many interweb tubez and caused the stream to get all clogged up. Problem solved, and next weeks show should run easy breezy!

Tilly

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!

One of my favorite Yahoo! Live channels is chickam2008. There’s no indirection, bait-and-switch, or rickroll going on here: It’s a bunch of baby chicks, keeping warm, growing, and clucking a bit.

I had to wake up ridiculously early yesterday, so I checked the Live home page, and was happy to find my little poultry there, completely oblivious. I double-clicked on the video to make it fullscreen (a secret/imperfect Yahoo! Live feature), and enjoyed my breakfast accompanied by the soothing sound of chicks.

I just have one small message for my favorite flock of chicks: When you grow up, please don’t forget the people who helped make you famous. We don’t want much — just a few fresh eggs from non-factory chickens, with their thick greenish shells and bright sunshine yolks. I know how good they taste, and I’d really like a few, please. I know you’ll have some to spare.

Heya! Allow me to formally introduce myself. My name is Tilly and I hang out here at the Y! Live Lounge. Over the last month, the guys here have not only supplied me with all the snacks I can nibble on, but every week they also let me broadcast and chit chat with ya’ll! Have you gotten the chance to catch one of our Town Hall sessions? If not, you totally should. Each week, Wednesdays at around 3:00pm, the team gives you, the broadcasters and viewers, a chance to interact and give feedback directly to the gang here that created and runs this entire site.

In just 2 meetings, ya’ll have already given the team all sorts of awesome input and brought up some really great questions. Let me just covered a few issues that have been brought to our attention, and see if we can finally clear the air.

The word filter system: Yea, kinda sucks, but I think we all know why it’s needed. Until we find a way to curb the language and terms that are used, unfortunately it’s a necessary evil.

Cutting back on font colors: Personally, I think this one is a little silly. Previously we offered users a TON of font color options to use in chat, but since we are using black as the chat background, some of the colors we offered were a bit too dark and hard to read. We still offer a range of 18 beautiful colors, and really? Did you need 873450 different shades of purple?

The missing Recently Live tab: Again, another case of a couple bad users ruining things for the whole class. But don’t worry, there is still the Who’s Live tab that you can hop over to and check out what hot on Live.

But no need to fear! Not everything discussed in our meetings is such a downer, a lot of really cool features have been suggested as well!

Chat scroll: For real, I totally feel ya on this one. We know the issue, it will be fixed, sorry it’s not as fast as people want. I promise you, the developers are definitely cooking up some cool ideas on how to make chat easier.

More privacy options: This is a concern that everyone here is very aware of, stay tuned, I think your gonna like what they came up with to have more control over your channel.

Mobile streaming: This might be the coolest idea ever. It’s a pretty big feature, so don’t expect a solution overnight, but that totally one of the directions that the team here would love to see things go!

Keep in mind that Y! Live is still in beta, and a very new project. As with any new site, there are gonna be some bugs to work out, features to implement and kinks to smooth over. I just want to honestly thank you for your support during our growth period, and let you know that the team here is truly excited to create new things that will make Y! Live not only the coolest place to hang out online, but also the most fun. Just remember, the community will only be as rad as the content that you broadcast. So get out there and take your life live!

In the interest of fostering communication, harmony and the like, some folks from the Live team will be around in the livenao channel on Wednesdays from 3 - 3:30 PST.  

Come visit!

We were honored to have an illustrious guest make a cameo appearance on Yahoo! Live yesterday and today - Jordin Sparks logged in as J-Speezy and chatted it up with her fans, and even did a few renditions of No Air and Tattoo for us all! It was a great broadcast - Jordin, we hope to see you online again soon!

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!

We can’t reveal the details, but Motley Crue will be broadcasting live tomorrow (Tuesday 4/15) at 4pm PST on Yahoo! Live. Come see what it’s all about.

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!

Can’t make it out to South Beach for the annual Winter Music Conference this year? No worries, this year you can join the fun from the comfort of your own cube by checking out Y! Live’s Winter Music Conference streaming site. We’ll be there next week (starting Tuesday 3/25 and ending Sunday 3/30) and will bring you the biggest DJ’s, live interviews, and poolside cams (in between margarita breaks, of course).

What will you see? Some live sets we’ll be covering: Paul Oakenfold, Moby, Paul Van Dyk, Satoshi Tomiie, Adam Freeland, Mark Farina, Roger Sanchez, Armand Van Helden, Steve Lawler. Some concerts and parties we’ll be at: Oakenfold Bourne Sessions, X-Mix Productions, Marine Parade, Ultra Music Festival, Remix Hotel Beatport pool party, SAW Recordings, Stealth, Defected in the House, CR2 Live and Direct.

We’ll bringing you this live coverage in partnership with Birago Jones from the SAW Recordings XM Show and the Syndicated Beats podcast, and with special our special Y! Live guest host Tilly Key.

Catch all the the action at http://wmc.live.yahoo.com, this page will be dedicated to WMC all week and will feature the top WMC streams along with a schedule of upcoming events.

Also, drop us a note at ylive-contact (at) yahoo-inc (dot) com if you’ll be at WMC and would like to broadcast while there, or otherwise just hang out. Look forward to seeing you all in South Beach and on Y! Live.