New York — Taking a different approach to Google’s Latitude software, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle team on Friday released a new app called, Friends on Fire, which integrates the location-based service to Facebook’s social network, enabling people to share their location with each other.
Google Latitude is an island unto itself, employing Google’s own technology for cell phone-based location detection and for managing who gets access to your location.
On the other hand Friends on Fire, though combines together a variety of services: Yahoo’s Fire Eagle, a service that can store and share your location with authorized applications, and Facebook, which handles the issue of identifying who your friends are and granting them permission to see your location.
Nevertheless, location broadcasting services still make many people uneasy, but as we have stated in the past, Fire Eagle’s privacy controls are among the best available and the Facebook app is no different. Friends on Fire mirrors Fire Eagle’s privacy options and will only display your location with the level of fidelity that you allow it to use. The options range from precise geo coordinates to simply the country you are currently in.
“We give you control over how much you choose to share with these different applications as well,” Tom Coates, with Yahoo’s technology development group, wrote in a blog post. “You can choose to share your cross-street or your country, you can hide yourself from everyone and — of course — you can change your preferences at any time.”
Yahoo has also released a Firefox add-on available which makes updating Friends of Fire considerably easier. It “adds a button to your toolbar [so] with one click, your location is instantly shared with your trusted friends on your favorite services,” Coates wrote.
Both of these new applications are certainly fascinating, and they will surely turn on a few more general users to the possibilities of LBS. Fire Eagle as a service, however, has a long way to go in terms of usability and user-friendliness.
Still, if you have been searching for a quick and easy way to get location data into Facebook, Friends of Fire fits the bill.