I've got serious reservations about applications that track my physical location, but Yahoo! made an impressive beta launch of its Fire Eagle service today that does just that. Fire Eagle is a platform that will allow other applications to incorporate location awareness into what they do.
The first two apps to engage with Fire Eagle is Dopplr, the super-hip social-travel app, and Danger Day, a service for updating your location on Twitter. Others are ramping up quickly, though Fire Eagle is still invite-only. We've got invite URLs posted at the end of this post, knock yourselves out. The Yahoo! Group for developers interested in Fire Eagle is here.
“Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy," the site says. "We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.” There's not much that can be done with Fire Eagle yet, but I'm optimistic about the platform for a number of reasons.
First, Yahoo! put privacy right out front. Many people want their data to be portable from service to service and many people want that to include their location data from mobile or other interfaces. I personally don't want my location broadcast automatically, at all, to anyone thank you very much. Fire Eagle has privacy and user control of data written all over it.
Users have the option to hide themselves with a single click, they can click to purge all their data from the Fire Eagle databases, the service even lets you select how often you'd like to receive an email reminding you that it is tracking your location as asking you to confirm that you want tracking to continue. By default you're emailed once a month for consent to be reconfirmed! Hello trust building measures! It's almost enough to make me interested in exposing my location, selectively.
Second, the way Yahoo! is developing its Platform is great. It's offering API kits in five different programming languages, it's got user authorization protocols already available for web, desktop and mobile apps and it's using the open standards community built oAuth to facilitate faster, more secure mashups. We wrote about oAuth's launch here and Google is also using it extensively in OpenSocial. This aint no cry-baby do it my way or I'm taking my ball and going home framework like the Facebook platform. This is leveraging universal open standards.
Standards based platform plus strong privacy equals the best scenario I can imagine for a location tracking service. We'll see what kinds of innovative applications get built on top of it.
Comments
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You think that it will be integrated with other Yahoo! services, such as the bluetooth/MyBloglog offering?
Posted by: Jeremy Pepper | March 5, 2008 3:43 PMOk, ok - link added to story under "serious reservations" re MyBlogLog brain implant. Thanks for the comment Jeremy.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickFrom a privacy perspective I also like that you can limit the application's location resolution. For example, you can choose to just expose your country, state, city, neighborhood, zip code, all the way down to your street address on a per application basis.
Posted by: Sam | March 5, 2008 4:38 PMLove Read/Write Web. Would love an invite to Fire Eagle.
Thanks
Mark
Posted by: Mark M | March 5, 2008 5:33 PMprivacy:
you can actually restrict the location detail by application
Twitter bot:
Posted by: martin english | March 5, 2008 6:03 PMThe instructions at http://soylentfoo.jnewland.com/articles/2007/06/24/fire-eagle-meet-danger-day#instructions
didn't work fro me. See http://www.martin-english.com/whatsup/2008/03/fireeagle-and-twitter for how I got it working.
Sam that's a good feature but I hope there is an easy way of notifying users of what level of detail is being used. I can see this causing some major privacy concerns for some.
Posted by: Heather | March 5, 2008 6:15 PMI find this very interesting. I travel a lot and currently live far away from my family. I will love this for keeping them updated with all of my travels. I definitely will scale it back to only show the city where I am... the thought of it showing my exact pinpoint on a map is scary to me. But I would love to integrate it in to my blog/website/facebook. My family sometimes has a hard time grasping where exactly I am and how far I have traveled so I see it as a great way to put everything in to context for Grandma, Aunts, etc. I really would use it for select situation, and definitely would not want it broadcasting who I am, and my exact location to the entire world.
I just hope they open the applications soon, so far the site is just a little boring.
Posted by: Justin P. | March 6, 2008 1:23 AMThe DangerDay instructions you linked to were from the previous iteration of the service. New instructions are here:
http://soylentfoo.jnewland.com/articles/2008/03/06/fire-eagle-location-aware-applications-without-the-hassle
Posted by: Jesse Newland | March 6, 2008 3:45 PMThe DangerDay instructions you linked to were from the previous iteration of the service. New instructions are here:
http://soylentfoo.jnewland.com/articles/2008/03/06/fire-eagle-location-aware-applications-without-the-hassle
Posted by: Jesse Newland | March 6, 2008 3:45 PMFire Eagle positioning is not only for Twitter. Mobile Jaiku (the S60 client) users are welcome to play with my jaiku2fireeagle script to update Fire Eagle as their cell phone moves around.
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/yahoo-fire_eagle_knows_where_my_phone_moves.html
Posted by: Henri Bergius | March 7, 2008 10:35 AM