May 15, 2008
Fire Eagle swoops on location services
Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s effort to broker location data for users and sites wanting to add where-in-the-world features, appears to be gaining traction, judging by a presentation at the Where 2.0 conference.
Tom Coates, leader of the project that launched the Fire Eagle beta two months ago at Yahoo’s experimental Brickhouse offices in San Francisco, gave a long list of sites now using or about to use the software
Coates described Fire Eagle as helping users to control their data and privacy by sitting in the middle of services providing location data and those services trying to use that data. He used the analogy of it being a lens that allowed the user to look through and see location-specific applications on social networks, search engines and other sites.
The list of Fire Eagle-enabled services includes Dopplr, social networking for travellers, Navizon, which uses Wi-Fi and cellular tower triangulation for its positioning service, the MyLoki location service, ZoneTag which location-tags photos from cell phones, Firebot’s Twitter direct-messaging updates of your location, Plazes and Brightkite, which offer location-based social networking, Fireball, for finding people at conferences and Proximizer, which shows how close a person is.
Others that he hoped would include Fire Eagle in the future included Wikinearest, an idea to tap the 1m geotagged articles in Wikipedia and show the five nearest locations to you, and a pair of Compass sneakers from Isaac Daniel, which have built-in GPS.
