Example of the Yahoo Live Api

Feb 13, 2008 · 2 minute read

Yahoo! Live launched recently along with a nice RESTful API. I’ve spoken before about the beauty of REST being in lowering the barrier to hacking and when I wanted a quick feature for Live it was simplicity itself to put together.

A few friends are using it far too much it seems, Ben has 7.6 hours and Si has already clocked up 15 hours. But for the most part I keep missing their no-doubt highly entertaining antics. One thing that Live misses I feel is a favourite users or previously viewed channels list. Basically I want to see which of my friends who use the service are broadcasting right now. Something like:

The API request we’re interested in is the /channel/PERMALINK method. This lets us get information about whether the user is broadcasting at the moment.

<code><?php
$api = 'http://api.live.yahoo.com/api/v1/channel';
$friends = array(
  'garethr',
  'benward',
  'sijobling'
);
$statuses = array();
foreach ($friends as $friend) { 
  $response = simplexml_load_file($api . '/' . $friend);
  $name = $response->name; 
  if ($response->broadcast) {
    $status = 'live';
  } else {
    $status = 'offline';
  }
  $statuses["$name"] = $status;
}
function displaylist($array) {
  $output = '';
  if (count($array) >= 0) {
    $output .= '<ul>';
    foreach ($array as $key => $value) {
      $output .= "<li class=\"$value\">";
      $output .= "<a href=\"http://live.yahoo.com/$key\">";
      $output .= "$key</a>";
      $output .= "<span>$value</span></li>";
    }
    $output .= '</ul>';
  }
  return $output;
}
echo displaylist($statuses);
?></code>

I’ll add a few more people to my list when I discover other people using the service. If you have an account leave a comment. I’ve added a touch of javascript as well so as to avoid having to reload the page manually. This way I can loiter on my little aggregator until someone I know starts broadcasting and head over to Live for whatever Si has been spending 15 hours doing.