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February 23, 2008
Mashup = Yahoo! Live + Yahoo! Maps + Yahoo! Pipes
After couple of hours, I have come up with simple mashup that uses Yahoo! Live API, Yahoo! Maps (AS3 library) and Yahoo! Pipes. This mashup, simply, shows live broadcasts (channels) on the map.
I love new Yahoo! Maps AS3 libarary, Yahoo! Live and more than these, I love Yahoo! Pipes, it's cool. I created a pipe in ten minutes and which saved (actually deleted) at least fifty (50) lines of code to handle Yahoo! Live API calls, results, get geo-data and aggregate.
Consuming Yahoo! Live API requires many HTTP requests to get data, whereas with Yahoo! Pipes, one request is good enough. I know, Yahoo! Pipes is doing most of thing on it's server but it does help us and users.
Yahoo! Live server doesn't have liberal crossdomain.xml (policy-file), so I needed proxy on my server, that's not even required with Yahoo! Pipes, so lots of server-bandwidth saved :-)
Check out the Yahoo! Pipe, I created.
You might not see all the live-channels on map because most of the Yahoo! Live users have not updated their profile with their locations(city, state, country) in their profile. So it's hard to get geo-data with existing API, hence those channels are not shown on map.
Sometimes you might see inactive channels on map, that's due to Y! Pipes' caching, I am looking into it.
I would write some more details of the application and code. Once I am done with:-
- channels within markers
- status messages
- AIR app - each channel can be unpinned to a native-window
- drag & drop markers on desktop to create shortcuts to channels
- and other things.
Technorati tags: yahoo, live, yahoo live, maps, pipes, mashup
Posted by Abdul Qabiz at February 23, 2008 04:05 AM
Comments
This is a great, Abdul. It seems a lot of people are firing up their webcams to give live broadcasting a go. As I've been clicking around, the only thing I wish this had was a hover state or a tool tip to indicate the channel name. I keep clicking on the same markers by accident. It's very cool though!
Posted by: Jason Beaird at February 25, 2008 04:57 AM
@Jason: App has lots of issues, I am working to fix it. I would show more details in markers and also handle cases where two markers are overlapping (probably two users are from location)..
Thanks
-abdul
Posted by: Abdul Qabiz at February 25, 2008 10:17 AM
Hi Abdul,
I tried this approach to be able to invoke yahoo pipes api from flex. When I change the domain name from pipes.yahoo.com to pipes.yahooapis.com, a valid RSS page is returned (after a long delay) but it is empty. However, the one on yahoo.com still provides valid results. Btw, I did not publish my pipe to public.
Could you please check if your yahooapis.com pipes still work?
Thanks you,
Shibu
Posted by: Cabot at April 22, 2008 01:34 PM