Fire Eagle, Yahoo's formerly experimental geolocation platform, is officially opening up to all users, and several companies are announcing products that work with it.
Fire Eagle is a warehouse for personal location information. If users tell Fire Eagle where they are, or have applications or devices that can do so on their behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with the user's permission) and provide geo-related services or social-network features.
One of the most interesting aspects of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows precisely at what address a user is, the user can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to certain apps or certain groups, or to restrict location reporting by time. There's also a 'hide me' button that users can press if they want to shut down location reporting for a period of time.
At the Fire Eagle launch on Tuesday, Yahoo highlighted three companies using the service:
- Pownce, the Twitter-like nanoblog service.
- Movable Type. The blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Streams service. It wasn't discussed at the Fire Eagle launch but it is likely that the new social-network products will also get support.
- Outside.in, a local news and community site. It will use Fire Eagle to automatically find information relevant to users' locations.
Other companies announcing services that work with Fire Eagle include: Brightkite, Dash, Dipity, Dopplr, ekit, LightPole, Navizon, Loki, Outalot, Plazes, Spot and Zkout. These companies are primarily location service providers or rudimentary social networks.
Asked what was in this initiative for Yahoo, two official answers were given. Yahoo co-founder David Filo said: "We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo services. But, by opening it up for the rest of the web, consumers are more likely to adopt it."
Fire Eagle tsar Tom Coates also said that there are possible direct revenues from the service, if Yahoo at some point decides to create a business version of the service for heavy users, like advertisers.
While Fire Eagle will not be advertising-supported, marketers could create location-based programs that use the service. The Yahoo team was adamant that Fire Eagle will be permission-based, however, so users won't end up giving their location away to services without their knowledge.
