I have big hopes for Yahoo’s new FireEagle platform announced in November 2007. They first described it to me as a Twitter for location. And it does stream your location information in a similar way that Twitter streams short messages. The service opened into private beta today.
But it is also more than that. FireEagle has (well, will have) open APIs to send data in and get data out. That will make a variety of other web services much more useful, since they’ll be able to figure out where you are without asking. Flickr images, for example, can be auto-tagged with location by comparing the time the photo was taken to your location at that time in FireEagle. From our initial review:
FireEagle, which is built entirely on Ruby on Rails, was originally inspired by Yahoo’s ZoneTag research product. It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.
Users can turn off tracking at any point, of course, and can also go in and delete any or all stored geo data about themselves. Yahoo says it will be immediately removed from their servers.
For now, though, the promise of FireEagle is still just that, a promise. The beta has next to no functionality - you can type in your location, which the service notes and then places on an embedded Yahoo map.
“Soon,” though, you’ll be able to send a text message with your location, or use ZoneTags on Nokia 60 phones to broadcast your location automatically. They’ll also release a mobile site for easier text input. There will be a FireEagle embeddable badge that will show where you are. And, finally, they’ll have the mandatory Facebook application to update locations and track friends.
Want in to the FireEagle beta? Get your invite here.
Update (Henry Work): Just tested the fire eagle API and it seems to work fine. I was able to create an app quickly, authenticate it over OAuth, and then grab my location data from my desktop. There’s no directory for applications, so I can’t go viral with my tester app just yet, but the whole developer angle seems promising.
I like the premise. Whether they’ll cash in or not, who knows. I am happy to see the focus off of search though!
Somebody is going to nail spatial awareness in the next couple of years. I just don’t think it’ll be Yahoo. There isn’t much of a “What’s in it for the first 10,000 users” to this service.
This should be an application that runs in the background with no needs to input data. It could be a simple browser plugin that would create a button you can click on whenever you want and it would automatically use your IP to update your location. The mobile client as well would be automated and use cell towers to update your location every n minutes/hours or each time you make a call. i think it has a huge potential…i am sure someone will use that data some day in court
“…I find your lack of faith disturbing.” - Darth Vader
Jaiku’s mobile client automatically update your location in background.. Is this similar service?
It looks like a cool service. I hope twitter ads this to there applicaiton.
dale
It’s worth saying that this is a developer launch designed specifically to get people building applications. The whole point is that we launched it now to a select group of people so that we could get applications before a full launch. BTW - Dopplr just announced a very gentle integration. More to follow!
just added a link to inviteshare. I have a few to give away, I assume others will too.
http://www.inviteshare.com/site.php?id=95
talk about stalker networks
Tom Coates - I just want to be clear that I think FireEagle is a really, really cool idea. Not much there now, but I get that you want third parties to build on it from both ends.
It sure would be cool if my iPhone just told it where I was every hour or so.
@ Michael -
Exactly, imminent (maybe?) iPhone SDK plus FireEagle api will be cool…
wonder why people who develop in rails always have to tell you that their site is a rails site?
cool idea, but did they not learn from twitter about how well rails scales?
weeeee: I feel you. By the way, CrunchBase is built on Rails.
As for the API — I just tested it out. It works. There’s a ruby gem for it, which is nice for quick command-line testing. Was able to register an app, do OAuth, and then get my location pretty quickly. There a bunch of the stuff in the documentation that says ‘NOT IMPLEMENTED YET’ — so, we’ll see how that goes. Cool calls I’m waiting for are within(), which allows you to ask for users using your app within zip codes, addresses, geo coords, etc. And also recent(), which, obviously, gives you all the users that have recently updated their location.
don’t get me wrong, rails is friggn awesome to develop in.
At least they focus on location.
Plazes is more complete than Fireeagle, has a desktop client, a mobile client, an API… But they added activities (like Twitter) to the locations. Even if it’s not a bad idea, they can’t compete with Twitter so they should have focused on location.
weeeeee: Languages don’t scale, architectures do.
Twitter’s problem is not rails, but is purely a database issue. At Scribd, we’re also pushing things to the limit, but it’s really not rails that breaks — it’s typically a database issue.
I think they might have missed the bus on this.
http://www.whrrl.com
I know this is nit picky, but concerning the test app built by Henry Work, since when does throwing an app into a listing directory make it “viral”? You really need some sort of network effect for it to be “viral”.
I work for a company called Pelago, and we produce a website/SMS service called Whrrl which is a much more full-featured implementation of this idea and more. Naturally, I’m a bit biased, but I think our site is way cooler!
Justin: yeah, I was totally just kidding.
Andrew: the point of FireEagle isn’t for them to make their own site feature rich. Rather, it’s about making a platform with an open API so that developers can get at location rich data.
They’re more of the intermediary, handling all the location data crunching. If everything goes to plan, every application out there will have access to a trusted and robust source of location data. That is a far more powerful concept than simply making a destination site that let’s you share your information.
It looks, dare I say, cute. Lovely interface.
I’ve got a few more screens over here - http://www.flickr.com/photos/s.....051115936/
Cheers,
Randy
Again, something Groovr (http://www.groovr.com/) has been doing for six months now, and has a ton of more features. Including the ability for form virtual chats around your content, an iphone specific interface, video support, etc etc etc…
@chris
Unless I’ve misunderstood Groovr (which is possible) they do not position themselves as a Open API to share location between applications.
Imagine it the equivalent of a hardware switch - except Fire Eagle is switching location data between apps instead of packets between computers.
Watching the launch at e-tech was a double edge sword for me; great because I really want to see location apps succeed (and the single biggest reason why they have not is critical mass of uptake and usage - i.e. no point seeing who is nearby if its not atleast 80% of people who might be relevant to you). On the flip side we’d had an API in the works to do just this, open up our functionality for matching users - people and locations - for anyone to use.
I think Fire Eagle could be the first step to kick off location based services to really be usable. We’ll be making http://www.rummble.com Fire Eagle compatible within days.
Meanwhile, if anyone wants to see the launch I’ve blogged the video at http://urbanhorizon.wordpress......tech-2008/
@ Greg
I tried using Plazes but its mapping is horrendous. It never puts the location in correctly.
My best guess after some research and talking to a friend at MyBlogLog is that the functionality they are working on over there to bind your bluetooth ID to your Yahoo account will come into play for this platform very soon once they add support for enough devices.
http://m.mybloglog.com/ for more info on that.
Brightkite also seems to be working on something similar. From what I can tell from their homepage it will not only be a location platform but a location-based social network as well. Additionally yesterday they announced their series A funding on their blog, but with little details around it.
http://brightkite.com
I haven’t been able to check it out yet, because they’re still in private beta, but I’ve heard that they are going to open it up next month.
There’s a twitter interface that lets you set your location by twitetr and lets other users query your location (again via twitter). See http://www.martin-english.com/.....nd-twitter
Do you try Ipoki.com?
Ipoki is a GPS-based social network with integration with Twitter.
Share your location and locate your friends in realtime.
http://www.ipoki.com
I think this is a wonderful idea and even though there might be others, the fact that this is from Yahoo is a fairly good indication that it will make it big. I’m looking out for this one!
GpsGate has a free “Buddy tracker” app. including web services interface for mashups and other integration. see http://gpsgate.com
Yahoo dos it again. This is a cool idea but I don’t know who chose the name “fire eagle”, but who knows maybe you will catch on.
Daniel Chege
Poppaproductions@gmail.com
Poppa Productions Web Designs