Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Yahoo’s Fire Eagle Soars into Location

Yahoo has taken the wraps off Fire Eagle – an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.

According to the search engine colossus, Fire Eagle gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers clear protocols for updating or accessing that information. Because it's open, any networked service can use Fire Eagle to respond to a user's location - to help them find their friends, annotate the world or find nearby services or local information.

"Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location," said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo! Brickhouse.

"We're here to help people take their location to the Web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with."

Fire Eagle was built at Yahoo! Brickhouse, a home for start-up like projects inside Yahoo where small teams seize on new ideas and create products around them.

Since its private beta launch in March of this year, Yahoo said the platform has integrated into some fifty live applications, including Dopplr, Pownce, Movable Type, and Outside.in.

Dopplr is a service for intelligent travelers that helps them make the most of their trips by sharing their travel plans with the people they trust whilst Outside.in's Radar offers personalized local news with the user at the center of the map. Radar shows everything going on nearby, wherever the user is, from the stories on the particular street the user is at, to the events in the neighborhood, to headlines in that city.