The Fire Eagle Has Landed: Yahoo Opens Its Location Platform to All
Yahoo just announced that the close beta period for its location platform Fire Eagle has ended and that the service is now open for everybody. We wrote about Fire Eagle extensively when the beta was first announced. Since then, a number of high-profile services, including Brightkite, Movable Type, Dopplr, and Pownce have implemented Fire Eagle through the numerous APIs Yahoo provides for accessing the service.
When we first wrote about Fire Eagle, we were especially concerned with the privacy implications of sharing your location online. This is especially important because Fire Eagle wants to be a central hub for sharing location information across applications.
However, it is important to note that Yahoo has made privacy a central focus of the platform and right upon sign-up, users are given the option to receive regular emails from Yahoo to see if they are still comfortable with sharing this kind of information. If you do not respond to this email, Yahoo will automatically disable your Fire Eagle account. Yahoo also allows users to turn the service off when they want to keep their location private.
Upon launch, Fire Eagle seems to be having some trouble with keeping up with the sudden rush of new users, as the service was sometimes unable to pinpoint our location. Once it is running smoothly again, we would not be surprised if Fire Eagle could make good on its promise of becoming the central clearinghouse for location services. Already, close to 800 developers are working on applications that make use of Fire Eagle in some form or another.
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What the F**k does this do? I can never get a clean explanation or description of what these kinds of apps are for-
I think their all based on subtle, techy BS-
It's just something 'New' to barf out...
Jonathan - think of Fire Eagle as a central storage for your location data that other apps can access and write to. It's more of a conduit than an application itself.
Hmm. Can you explain the problem that this solves?
I would have thought that any mobile app creators would create the applications to take the users location into account using the phone's inbuilt GPS functionality?
Is this less for mobile app creators, and more for websites? e.g. A website would track where users are through Eagle Fire (which a user would have installed as a mobile app and allowed the to follow them) and the website then would be able to see where the user is at the time that they visit the website?
BTW. I am a different Jonathan to "Jonathan K Hinkle".
It's about informaiton sharing. so your mobile app guys would be able to pinpoint via, say gps, and that could let twitter know that your current entry is in NY,NY. which in turn could let your upcoming.org follower bot know to send you a bunch of gigs in the area... as a quick example.
you also don't need gps at the start of the chain, you could simply say you're in NY and off you go.
another example would be uploading to flickr, and having your pictures geo located, then having your pownce buddies in that area notified that an event is happening, or perhaps it's just a fancy way of doing flashmobs...
Key point is it's about the sharing and normalisation of geo info rather than finding a users gps coordinates.
@ The Jonathans
Being inquisitive is welcomed, but please save this kind of rudeness for your friends at Microsoft:
"...What the F**k does this do? I can never get a clean explanation or description of what these kinds of apps are for. I think their all based on subtle, techy BS.."
My immediate question is; if you think such revolutionary, game changing API like FIre Eagle is "techy BS", just what the F**k, as you so eloquently put it, are you doing here on the nerdiest, techy BSiest, site on teh Interwebs?
Anyway, I can send you a BriteKite invitation and you can see Fire Eagle in action for yourself, it is super double plus awesome.
@ Todd.
I fail to see how my reply (number 3) was in any way rude. Your was on the other hand.
As per my reply, I am guessing that this is less useful for those that create actual mobile apps (as they can easily read the GPS data from the user's phone and geo-code it) and more useful for websites who do not want to build mobile apps but want to know where users are (e.g. when they are interacting with the website)?.
@ not rude Jonathan
dm me and I will send you a Bright Kite invite, and you can see Fire Eagle interact. DE's huge selling point is it's user privacy settings.
Ooops, we just feel asleep. We'll be back up and running in no time though. Please excuse this disruption of Fire Eagle services. Return to the home page
Location-based services will become even more mainstream as GPS becomes a standard feature in mobile devices. There will be some that we'll love and some that we'll hate.
Advertising isn't staying behind either. Loopt has a deal with CBS Mobile to transmit location-based advertising to Sprint Nextel and Boost Mobile GPS-enabled devices. So maybe as you are walking by a store, you could get a SMS saying they have 50% discount on selected merchandise.
@Jack C
Yeah, that's kind of a given, but I want more than something as crude as that.
As my physical location changes, I want all my cloud services to machine read that and reconfigure themselves appropriately.
Example: My Android phone tells the Fire Eagle API that I am within a 5 mile radius of my place of employment between the hours of 8 AM and 6 PM. The Fire Eagle API tells Twiiter to turn all the updates from all my NON-work people on my Twitter friends list to "web only" and not text my phone. Later after I get out of work, the inverse occurs with out me doing anything at all.
Very worrying development which raises a lot of security, privacy and ethical concerns. For more on this see the blog http://cyberpanda-cyberpanda.blogspot.com/
Ooops, we just feel asleep. We'll be back up and running in no time though. Please excuse this disruption of Fire Eagle services. Return to the home page