Yahoo Fire Eagle Now Public
Yahoo Fire Eagle has come out of private beta, and it’s now open to everyone. Fire Eagle provides a unified way for applications and web sites to share location data tied to specific users.
For your average web surfer or mobile device user, this means a single, unified way for sharing your location across all of the sites and applications you use (that are on Fire Eagle). When you update your location in one application, other applications get updated as well. Privacy controls let you decide exactly how that sharing should work.
So imagine you are using an application on your phone that works with Fire Eagle. Let’s say that app uses your GPS location to find restaurants near you. When it does so, it notifies Fire Eagle where you are. Now suppose a completely different web site exists that lets people tell their friends where they are. If it works with Fire Eagle, then it’ll see the update from the restaurant finder on your phone.
As a developer, this opens up a whole new range of possibilities, and it also increases the amount of data you could observe.
This is relevant to one of my previous posts on location tracking, and it’s an area I’m really interested in. Will developers embrace it? Will users fear the privacy implications? We’ll see.