blog.Adonis.net

Fire Eagle is Yahoo’s new geolocation service, and until today was available to a handful of developers who had managed to wrangle an invitation.

Fire Eagle is primarily intended to provide a standard way for other applications to store and retrieve data about where you are at any particular time. For example, you may have an application on your cell phone that sends GPS coordinates to Fire Eagle, where they can then be retrieved by another application that can inform you about places in the area that may be of interest to you. Yet another application may check your location against that of your friends, and let you know who’s nearby and what they’re up to.

I allow Fire Eagle to tell WikiNear exactly where I am at any time so that it can tell me about points of interest on the street I’m walking down when I access it from my cell phone’s browser, but I only let the location-based social network/Yelp hybrid Rummble to access the zip code I’m currently traveling through. Each application that access your location data can have different privacy settings, and you can choose to allow one application to know your exact street address, while only allowing another to know what country you’re in.

As an example of the sort of thing that can be done with a common access point for location data, you may have noticed a box that appeared in the upper right of these pages that showed where I was at any particular moment (it’s been temporarily removed due to an incompatibility with the version of WordPress I run here, but I’m sure it’ll be back in some form). At various times I may have Navizon determine where I am using information about the Wi-Fi hotspots nearby, or I may have checked in at the office using the Twitter-like Brightkite. These are two very different applications, but they share the ability to store data about my location in Fire Eagle’s databases. Once one of those applications had stored where I was at Fire Eagle, another applet could access that data and display my current city, state and zip code on my blog.

Fire Eagle’s just getting started, but already there are several interesting applications listed in their gallery that support the platform, and I’m sure many more are on the way.

Update:

Used a few elements of Klaus Komenda’s “I Am Here” Wordpress plug-in with a little code of my own, and an improved version of the “Where Am I?” box in the upper right corner is back.