There's a fair amount of buzz about Fire Eagle, Yahoo's new location service, at the Web 2.0 expo this week, where the Yahoo! team has been promoting invites to the private beta of Fire Eagle and a new application called Fireball has launched. There is good information available on the web, but the best explanation is Tom Coates presentation at ETech in San Diego last month:
At first look, it seems a trivial service: a repository for user's location, APIs for updating location in Fire Eagle, APIs for retrieving location from Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle doesn't even store a user's historical location, only their current location. Further, although the team talks of 50+ developers and partners building applications in stealth, the application gallery only features a few applications, many of them written by a single developer.
Tens of thousands of developers writing applications on this platform (think Facebook) is interesting, but the potential of Fire Eagle promises to emerge as larger, more established applications and social networks start invoking Fire Eagle to geo-enable their applications. Flickr could show me photos taken nearby, and Yelp could instantly serve up a list of local restaurants without asking me to input my location.
Fire Eagle is built to interface directly with the applications it supports (in a broad spectrum of developer languages). This means individual users have to authorize the application (i.e., LinkedIn) to access Fire Eagle, and individual users can control the level of data exchanged between Fire Eagle and the application. For example, Facebook could broadcast my precise location to my Facebook friends, LinkedIn could broadcast the city I am traveling in to my professional network. Tying access controls and privacy controls to the applications using the service is particularly clever, and will help assuage the fears users will have about broadcasting their location:
As for Fireball, it's a simple app that helps people track their friends via Fire Eagle and Twitter, using twitter as the user interface and Fire Eagle for the location information. There are good summaries of the service at TechCrunch and Fireball. It's an light but interesting application, but suffers the same Achilles heel of Dodgeball (acquired by Google in 2005) - the need for the user to manually input location.
One of the Fire Eagle application partners - Navizon - aims to solve this problem. Navizon is a small downloadable mobile client that uses GPS, wi-fi, and cell towers (depending on the phone) to detect a user's location. It runs on a broad spectrum of devices, including Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone (broken), and all s60 devices by LG, Nokia and Samsung. It also runs on Windows and Mac PCs, and can update the location of these devices.
I downloaded Navizon to my blackberry and linked it to Fire Eagle, allowing it to update my location. At first, Navizon used cell towers to locate me, and missed by about 10 miles. When I allowed it access to my phones GPS, it improved to about 1/2 a mile.
Neither level of accuracy is very good - I expect accuracy of a couple of kilometers from cell towers and 10-20 meters using GPS - but it was good enough to see the potential of Navizon, Fire Eagle and an application provider working together.
Location-detection clients
Navizon (pc, mobile), Loki (pc, mobile), ZoneTag (mobile), Plazes Plazer (pc), iPhone LocateMe
Fire Eagle applications
Fireball, Firebot, Fire Widgets, Loki, Dopplr, Plazes, MoveableType, Wikinear, Zonetag (to Flickr)
Related Companies
Skyhook Wireless (also operates Loki), Loopt, Twinkle
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Bottom Line: Wow. Fundamentally
innovative and compelling location service that will drive location
based services into the mainstream
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