For some time now, Fire Eagle has been in a closed beta open only to some 50 developers. However, today marks the general availability and launch of Yahoo’s new location sharing service Fire Eagle. Here is how Yahoo! describes its new server:
“Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, other services and devices can either update that information or access it. By helping applications respond to your location, Fire Eagle is designed to make the world around you more interesting! Use your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services, blog badges and stuff like that…”
To those familiar with Twitter, the concept is very similiar: You post similple updates to the service (location information), and it acts as a distrubutor of that information to any that requests it (ex: location status on a personal website or blog). With the help of already developed applications, it makes spreading your location updates on other services, like facebook, easy. With the Yahoo!’s embrace of developers via an API, multiple tools, and documentation resources, you are bound to see the capabilities and prevalence of this new service explode.
To top it off, like most cool new social services, Fire Eagle is completely free. There is even Fire Eagle Mobile, granting you the ability to update your location via your cell phone with one click! Sounds scary, but this is a lot of fun for people - not mention useful. But, what about this privacy? And why would Yahoo! offer such a service for free?
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