March is a great month to get your geek on. Tech conferences flourish: O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, now in its seventh year, heralds springtime in San Diego. South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin’s annual music, multimedia, and film extravaganza tests the stamina, sociability, and interaction skills of thousands web developers and designers from all over the world, with more than a week of panels, presentations, and parties.

Last Wednesday at ETech, Tom Coates from Yahoo!’s Brickhouse invited participants to “ride the Fire Eagle.” His keynote announced the developer’s beta launch of Fire Eagle, “a secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy.” Fire Eagle invitation cards flew out of the booth and into the hands of hundreds of developers attending the event.

O’Reilly Media also hosted Graphing Social Patterns (GSP), a new conference held in conjunction with ETech, focused on the business and technology of social platforms. Yahoo! Developer Network participated in ETech and GSP as a gold sponsor. Following Charlene Li’s Monday morning keynote on the Future of Social Networks (you can view her presentation deck here), MyBlogLog product guy Ian Kennedy announced the opening of MyBlogLog’s APIs.

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo! service that powers the “Recent Readers” badge, which you’ll find on our sidebar and all across the blogosphere. MyBlogLog is a tool that lets people learn about their community of readers, and gather and display pointers to all the online social services they use. By opening its APIs, MyBlogLog gives developers tools to create interesting new social mashups and news ways to visualize online communities and social activity data.

Speaking of social activity streams: dozens of Yahoos participated as speakers, panelists, booth staffers, and attendees at ETech, GSP, and South by Southwest. Take a peek at some highlights of our ETech presence, captured by Ricky Montalvo for the Yahoo! Developer Network theater:

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo from James Duncan Davidson