Yahoo FireEagle Tells Web Apps Where You Are
Yahoo has rolled out a new geodata service, tentatively dubbed FireEagle, which consists of APIs designed to make it easier for developers to build geo-aware applications that respond to your location. FireEagle is currently a closed alpha, though the site offers a sign up option for curious developers.
Techcrunch reports that the new framework is expected to open up later this month, possibly under a different name.
The FireEagle APIs will offer a framework for applications to respond to user submitted geodata. For instance, say you have a Wifi camera and you’re uploading photos to Flickr. Using the FireEagle framework, Flickr could automatically geotag your uploaded photos based on location information provided by the camera (assuming it were capable of such things).
As I understand it, FireEagle isn’t doing anything that you couldn’t do by hand, rather it’s providing a way for web applications like Flickr and others to automate the process of adding geodata, which is somewhat cumbersome to do by hand.
The Techcrunch post also has some shots of a Facebook application that uses FireEagle to update a user’s location based on input from devices like geo-aware mobile phones.
As with most developments in the geo-location realm, FireEagle offers some really cool possibilities —I have no doubt that web developers will leap at the chance to offer seamless integration of geodata — but it also looks a little bit creepy. Do we really want everyone to know exactly where we are all the time? Of course, if you consider that your mobile service provider already has that information, perhaps concern over making it public is a moot point.
Whatever the case, FireEagle looks to simplify the process of adding up-to-date geodata to your favorite web services and we’ll be sure to let you know more when the service opens up the public.
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