the insidedesign blog

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?

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!