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Fire Eagle is now open to everyone!! As the product manager of Fire Eagle, I'm super excited to announce the general availability launch of your favorite, or soon to be favorite, location switchboard. You don't need to request an invitation to save your relationship - just go right up to http://fireeagle.yahoo.net and sign up for your free Fire Eagle account, surf over to the gallery, and start connecting your websites and services to your location.

Back in March, we began inviting developers to try out Fire Eagle. The developer community responded enthusiastically, helping us refine the APIs, finding bugs for us and creating over 50 Fire Eagle applications with many many more developers exploring the possibilities. Today is about more than just us launching, it's about all the developers who supported and encouraged us from the beginning, who saw the potential and built Fire Eagle applications, and who patiently waited for us to launch Fire Eagle so that the user community (hopefully including you) can finally share your location with their applications.

Overall, beyond developers and APIs, Fire Eagle is about helping you take your location to the Web and giving you control over how, when and with what your location is shared. You choose which applications can share and update your location. You choose how much information you want to share – from as broad as country or state, to as detailed as zip code or cross streets, and everything in between. You choose when and how to update your location.

So what exactly can you do with Fire Eagle?

First, you have to update your location somehow. There's a myriad of ways to update easily. Try automatic updater applications like Navizon, My Loki, ZoneTag or a J2ME mobile updater. Authorize those applications to update your location in Fire Eagle. If you need something more rugged, try Spot. You can also manually update your Fire Eagle location from our website and other applications.

Once you've got a good way to update your Fire Eagle location, that's when the fun starts. Now, you can choose an unlimited number of applications to share your location with. For each application, you control how you want to share your location without having to update each one separately. A simple one is Fire Widgets, Mac OS X dashboard widgets. You choose to authorize it to access your exact location or just by city level. It will then query Fire Eagle for your location and display the weather and photos near you. How about a badge of your location on your blog? Authorize the Movable Type Fire Eagle plugin to display your location at zip code level and Fire Eagle will only share your location up to zip code level only. Want more? There's Pownce, Outside.in, Lightpole, ZKOUT, ekit, Dipity, Dopplr and ... whew! Seriously, get started by checking out the staff picks. And read our blog for the latest on new applications and stuff.

Lastly, a big shout-out to the Fire Eagle team, past and present. This launch is the culmination of so many people believing in the vision and working their butts off that it's not possible to list everyone who has kept the flames of Fire Eagle burning. Having been the PM since the early beginnings of the project, I am so proud to have been part of such an incredible team of rock stars through and through. Ahem, alright, enough sap.

Oh, and we're having a launch party on Thursday the 14th to celebrate. Come meet the team and the developer community who helped us out, and have drinks and tacos on us!

Popularity: 14% [?]

If you are a developer and have ever wished to bring rich music content into your site, now you can. Last week Yahoo! made available to the public the new Yahoo! Music API.

This release contains a wealth of documentation for developers to start building cool new music applications, including the API reference, best practices and examples. You can browse the music catalog, get recommendation/ratings information, and playback high quality music videos through the extensible Music Video Player.

Here’s an example of an application that you could build using this API, which lets you view music videos on Facebook. You can check out some of the other ideas that are coming out of this at the Y! Music Blog.

Have a look and let us know what you think. Happy hacking!

Popularity: 13% [?]

Hack Days are fun, no doubt, but what about getting hacks out the door? Yahoo!'s hack culture has been a blast to be part of, but one of the biggest challenges is integrating the great hacks into products and shipping them. After all, product roadmaps are big, and there's always an appetite to do more - would you want it any other way? But, given the size of these roadmaps, it’s not always easy for hack teams to know how to proceed after a hack day. And getting hacks productized is one of the best aspects of the hack program. So, here are some tactics to make that happen....

I’ve been running various flavors of an “enhanced” hack program in my part of the Yahoo! world for almost three years. Borne out of experiments that began while I was managing the Y! Autos engineering team, this program has evolved into these three core aspects:

1. Three-Day Hack Events

Picking the right timeframe for a hack event is key for bringing forward the best hacks while minimally impacting the roadmap. One-day hack events generated lots of very small hacks and proved difficult for hackers to conceive, design, and build something lasting. We tried a one-week-long event at one point in Y! Shopping, but it proved too disruptive to roadmap-focused activities. We settled on three-day events to drive bigger hacks. These three-day events give the teams time to coalesce, commit to a larger idea, and have the time to build it.

2. Business feedback and hack ratings (“H-ratings”)

After the hacks are initially presented in a fun open-call demos/prizes session, each business unit’s cross-functional leadership team (including the GM, product lead, eng lead, design lead, bizdev lead, etc.) meet with the hackers who built hacks for their particular area (e.g., Yahoo! Local).

Hackers then do their demos again, followed by the whole group having an in-depth discussion where “bullet point” level feedback is given and scribed. The leadership team gives each hack a rating, called an H-Rating, which is one of:

• H1. Approved for release: launch this ASAP, typically less than one engineering-month of work to complete.
• H2. Approved for roadmap: compelling enough for the product roadmap; work will require more than one engineer-month.
• H3. Pursue if desired. Key issues are identified, e.g., scaling, business showstopper, not compelling. It's then left up to hack team to decide whether to continue pursuing it or not – typically, these are either revised and continued at a later hack event, or they are abandoned.

The leadership team takes a bias towards approving things for release (“H1”) whenever possible.

We’ve shipped some major hacks with this process:

• Search Along A Route
• MapMixer
• Shop by Color
• Yahoo! Suggestion Board
• Car Finder
• …plus many smaller hacks...

3. Time to productize

Innovation experts are quick to point out that slack time is essential to innovating. I’m aware of a number of groups at Yahoo! that have tried various things to bring in slack time, such as "Friday afternoon hacking" for all engineers, one-off allocations of 1+ engineers for specific innovative projects, and my own personal favorite – the hack time grant program. With the time grant program, 15% of the engineering team’s time is reserved for innovation work. The engineering managers pool 15% of the team’s time on a quarterly basis; for example, calculating that in a team of 12 engineers, they can spend 25 engineering-weeks per quarter on innovation. This is not an “entitlement” that every engineer gets. Instead, it is time that any engineer can apply for through a one-page email request. The engineering managers review grant requests periodically and they spend the 15% budget every quarter. They can use it to invest in key areas, reward exciting innovations with move development time, and work on getting cool things out the door. In a mystery competitor’s 20% innovation time program (sometimes called a 120% program :D), I’ll hazard a guess that only 20% of the engineers participate, so they net only a 4% innovation investment.

The business value of the grant program is huge:

• Drive innovation/differentiation into a product from more people
• Employee retention
• Huge selling point in interviews (I noticed that there is no better way to get an interviewee to smile)
• Gets the team to point out and address "low hanging fruit"

I have been using time grants for my teams since early 2006. The engineers I work with appreciate that they can get time to work on projects without having to deal with the “unknown” factor, which includes having to negotiate for time in a team’s business roadmap. We are now exploring expanding the grant program to other sibling teams in our org.

In our efforts, the design, product management, QA, and release engineering teams support the program as much as they can. While they aren’t yet formally allocating a percentage of their time, they do help us get hacks into products – especially when they are part of a hack team.

So what’s next for the whole program?

Due to the success of this program in my organization, we're now working on getting the program more widely adopted. Also, I’m looking into whether a “Hack Maturity Model” (a la CMM) might be a good way to clarify various levels of hack sophistication across the company, to correlate success in building and shipping hacks with a set of best practices. “HMM1” might be just participating in corporate hack days, whereas “HMM4” might be H-ratings, formal slack program, and shipping all H1’s within three months. I'll keep you posted on how these go.

Popularity: 18% [?]

One of the great things about the spacious Brickhouse office is that we can host talks like the one tomorrow night, on Innovation Through Collaboration. It's the tenth Luna Philosophie, and will feature Doug Comstock, who directs NASA's Innovative Partnerships Program (IPP). He will speak on some of the technological breakthroughs that have come through partnering with NASA. Come join us! We'll have grub and drinks, as always.

And, if you were able to join us for our last NASA talk by Apollo astronaut, Rusty Schweickart, on how nukes aren't necessarily the best option for stopping asteroids from plummeting towards earth, Wired posted a nice overview in their blog. If you'd like to learn more, check out Rusty's site on the B612 Foundation.

Popularity: 18% [?]