Wednesday, 13. August 2008
Fire Eagle Comes Out of Yahoo’s Nest
Yahoo recently launched Fire Eagle, an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while letting them control how and where their location data is shared.
The service appears to give users complete control over which applications have access to their location. Users can also control whether an application can track their exact location, their ZIP code or merely the city they are in, for example. And they can purge any personal information from the system when they want to.
The service can be updated on the Fire Eagle web site, via SMS, a Mac widget, or by using an application—such as those offered by ZoneTag, My Loki or Navizon—on a location-aware cell phone to automatically broadcast your location.
Fire Eagle was built at Yahoo Brickhouse, a home for start-up like projects inside Yahoo. Since its private beta launch in March of this year, the company said Fire Eagle has been integrated into over 50 live applications.
Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo Brickhouse, said the idea behind Fire Eagle is to bring location awareness to everything on the Internet and to give control back to the user.