Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there
It's open to developers now. We're waiting to see what they develop.
At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.
Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).
If you're curious to see what Fire Eagle can offer, though, ignore today's news about it. Fire Eagle itself does not, yet, have a useful interface. But since it's now open to developers, we should see cool apps soon. We heard this morning that Dopplr will have Fire Eagle integration shortly, and that the Bug Labs geolocation module will support the API. We'll report on these new applications when they show up for trials. Update: Dopplr has implemented the link to Fire Eagle. Very cool.
Read also:
TechCrunch: Yahoo's "Twitter For Location" Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality.
ReadWriteWeb: Location Aware: Smart Rollout for Yahoo! Fire Eagle.