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?

What about Privacy? and why would this be Free?

Fire Eagle’s mobile website allows you to update easily on the go.

Right upon signup, users are given the opportunity to receive regular emails from Yahoo to ensure they are still comfortable with their decision on sharing this sort of information. They take it another step forward, because if you fail to respond to this email – the service is automatically turned off. There is also a simple keep my location private setting.

Jason Kincaid, over at TechCrunch.com, brings up an important point that Yahoo! has no current control on “remov[ing] location updates from partner sites”. So location history can continued to be displayed throughout these partner services, even when the user has full control over their location status on Fire Eagle. It is true that part of Yahoo!’s partner Terms of Service includes agreements on allowing users to delete their messages, but as Jason mentioned, this is nearly impossible to enforce.

So why is this free? Is Yahoo! is offering this service because it is such a cool idea? Probably not. In fact, I believe it has all to do with location based advertising. You see, with your location, comes the opportunity to display ADs for products and services near or related to where you located. Makes perfect sense, and local based commerce online is become more popular. It seems pretty clear to me in the Information Collection and Use section of Yahoo!’s Privacy Policy:

“Yahoo! uses information for the following general purposes: to customize the advertising and content you see, fulfill your requests for products and services, improve our services, contact you, conduct research, and provide anonymous reporting for internal and external clients.”

Whether you are weary of privacy, or simply do not like relevant ADs, or even ADs at all (nahhh, right?) – Fire Eagle is a neat service with tons of potential. If you are on the Internet, you have pretty much waived this issues off to begin with. So, anyone wanna see a Fire Twitter?

It seems as though Marco has unearthed an easter egg in Google’s new release of Google Earth, its popular free mapping software. While the new release stunned the world with its addition of mapping the universe, it has also secretly included a flight simulator!

To check it yourself, simply download and load up the most recent version of Google Earth and press CTRL+ALT+A or for a MAC, Command+Option+A. Upon doing so the flight simulator should load right away with a dialog that grants you the options of plane and airport (as see to the right).

You have the option of piloting two planes: the F16 or the SR22. Both are very different and enjoyable rides. Check it out for yourself, but be sure to familiarize yourself with the flight controls! If using the arrow keys is not your thing, you can also use your mouse to steer the aircraft (just click the screen with your mouse to activate).

Note: After you have entered into the flight simulator using the keyboard combination, simply access it again from the Tool drop down menu.

Check out some of the in-game screen shots:

Let me know how you fare at flying! The controls are touchy…

We all understand that users are strongly biased towards higher positions in the SERPs, it shows in our logs! However, and more interesting, the study goes on to conclude:

“While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine’s tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.”

So, users are heavily biased towards the top listings on Google – even if the provided title and description is not relevant! They trust in Google, and truly believe what is being provided to them is the best results. But what does this mean to a search engine optimization professional? Here are some points that come to mind:

1. General, high traffic keywords bring lots of visitors – a high percentage being low quality and unqualified visitors.
2. Optimize for niche keywords to keep conversion rates high.
3. A high listing in the SERPs is an authority and trust builder with users.

Check out the study, an interesting read for any technical SEO professional.

A few days ago I get an email from Snap.com, informing me that they are revamping their advertising program. Kindly, they also inform me that they are going to refund my initial deposit of $50 and need me to confirm my mailing address. How great is that? Here is the email they sent my way:

Dear Eric Sopp,

Snap.com is in the process of re-engineering our advertising servers and we will not be able to deliver your advertising at the current time.

Rather than ask you to wait until our systems are back online, we would like to issue you a check for a refund of your current pre-paid account balance, which our records show to be $50.00 credit.
Please reply to this email to verify your address. Your account shows:
Address1: [removed]
Address2: [removed]
City: [removed]
State: [removed]
Zip: [removed]

Please hit the REPLY button and select one of these options:

[ ] All information is correct

[ ] Please change my address. (Subject to verification).
Address1:
Address2:
City:
State:
Zip:

Thank you,

Team Snap

If you are not familiar with Snap.com, you should really check it out. A search engine started by the same people who brought you Overture (a PPC advertising program later bought by Yahoo!), Snap.com is an innovator in the Online Search Industry.