Yahoo’s Fire Eagle Geo-Location Service Knows Where You Are
San Francisco – Yahoo Inc. on Tuesday assembled at its San Francisco office, known as Yahoo Brickhouse, to announce the release of Fire Eagle, the company’s formerly experimental geo-location platform, a tool that provides an interface for updating, managing and storing information about locations, is now officially opened up to all users, and several companies are announcing products that work with it.
The portal giant claims that the tool can also automatically add the data to geo-aware Web, mobile or desktop applications for site owners and assures that privacy control will stay with the user.
Basically, Fire Eagle is a central collection area that Yahoo maintains where users can update their location, and choose which sites to share the information with.
Fire Eagle, which was built at Yahoo’s internal Brickhouse incubator for start-up projects; enable users to authorize automatic updates of their location, or to do it manually. It also allows users the option to hide their location, change preferences for sharing their location or delete any stored personal information, Yahoo said. Since its private beta launch in March, Fire Eagle has been included into more than 50 live applications, including Dopplr, Pownce, Movable Type and Outside.in, through the platform’s API, Yahoo added.
“Fire Eagle allowed us to easily add location data to Pownce using their simple API,” said Leah Culver, co-founder of Pownce, in a statement. “Pownce users can now say where they are and geo-tag their notes, which adds a new dimension to the service.”
In addition, Fire Eagle also provides developers with simple protocols for adding location-based information to any networked service, said Yahoo. For example, Fire Eagle can help users find the physical location of their friends or of services or local information.
“The service is available for free to any application and any user who wishes to try it.”
“We certainly wanted this functionality for Yahoo’s services,” David Filo, a Yahoo co-founder, said to reporters in San Francisco. By opening it up to everyone, the service will probably gain much wider adoption, Filo said.
The company likens the software to a switchboard that distributes location data based on user-selected privacy settings.
Frederic Lardinois, a blogger at ReadWriteWeb, observed that Fire Eagle could create serious privacy concerns as a central hub for sharing locations across applications, but added that Yahoo has made privacy an important focus of the platform.
“Right upon sign-up; users are granted the option to receive regular e-mails from Yahoo to see if they are still comfortable with sharing this kind of information,” Lardinois said. “If you do not respond to this e-mail, Yahoo will automatically disable your Fire Eagle account. Yahoo also allows users to turn the service off when they want to keep their location private.”
Lardinois also remarked that when it first launched Tuesday, Fire Eagle had trouble keeping up with a rush of new users.
“Once it is running smoothly again, we would not be surprised if Fire Eagle could make good on its promise of becoming the central clearinghouse for location services,” Lardinois added. “Already, close to 800 developers are working on applications that make use of Fire Eagle in some form or another.”
For site owners, at this moment over 50 third-party applications from partners like SixApart, which offers a blogging platform, and Pownce, a micro-blogging service, are using Fire Eagle.
“We can bring the same functionality to Yahoo properties,” said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo Brickhouse, a home for start-up-like projects within Yahoo.
Meanwhile, Six Apart is offering a Fire Eagle connection on its Movable Type blogging platform, which it just upgraded today to mold it into more of a social network.
And for the pure-play social networks, the ability to know who is where could be especially useful for planning social events. Still, Yahoo is taking pains to brush away the Big Brother connotations that invariably spring from any type of geo-tracking technology.
“The user can choose how much information to share — that is a really big deal,” said Coates. “By default none of your information is shared,” he said in a statement.
One of the most interesting elements of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows exactly at what address you are, you can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to a specific apps or certain groups, or you can restrict location reporting by time. There is also a “hide me” button you can press if you want to shut down location reporting for a period of time.
At the Fire Eagle launch event, Yahoo highlighted three companies using the service:
Pownce: The Twitter-ish nanoblog service. Having location available in this type of product really does change how users interact. See also Twinkle, a Twitter-compatible nanoblog service for the iPhone.
Movable Type: The blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service. It was not discussed at the launch but one assumes the new social network products will also get support.
Outside.in: A local news and community site. It will use Fire Eagle to automatically find the info that’s relevant to your location.
Other companies announcing services that work with Fire Eagle include: Brightkite, Dash, Dipity, Dopplr, ekit, Lightpole, Navizon, Loki, Outalot, Plazes, Spot, and Zkout. These companies are primarily location service providers or rudimentary social networks. I am looking forward to seeing major social nets (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed) and other data and news sites (Google Maps, Digg, CNN, Eventful), add Fire Eagle support.
Fire Eagle also caters to mobile Web sites, and seems a step closer to the long-deferred mobile advertising dream of being able to ping people with coupons as they walk in front of a business. So conceivably, people who opt-in to Fire Eagle could be opting in to geo-targeted ads.
“We think there are a number of ways that we think the Fire Eagle platform is good for Yahoo’s business, and advertising is certainly one of them,” Coates said.
Although, Mike Folgner, the former Jumpcut CEO who recently took over running Yahoo Brickhouse, characterized Fire Eagle as a project that would pave the way for future growth at Yahoo. Though he does not yet see location data as an investment on par with mobile or search technology, he pointed to the presence of Yahoo co-founder David Filo at the Fire Eagle launch event as an indication of the company’s commitment to its evolving development platform.
Yahoo Brickhouse, located in San Francisco’s South of Market district, was launched last year as a startup-style incubator where small development teams work unhindered by corporate bureaucracy.