Webware

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.

A refresher: Fire Eagle is a storehouse for personal location information. If you tell Fire Eagle where you are, or have applications or devices that can do so on your behalf, then other applications can grab that info (with your permission) and provide you geo-related services or social network features.

One of the most interesting parts of Fire Eagle is its variable privacy feature. Even if Fire Eagle knows precisely at what address you are, you can set it to only release more general information, like the city, to certain apps or certain groups, or you can restrict location reporting by time. There's also a "hide me" button you can press if you want to shut down location reporting for a period of time.

At the Fire Eagle launch event today, Yahoo highlighted three companies using the service:

• Pownce, the Twitter-ish nanoblog service. Having location available in this type of product really does change how users interact. See also Twinkle, a Twitter-compatible nanoblog service for the iPhone.

• Movable Type. The blog platform will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service. It wasn't discussed at the launch but one assumes 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 the info that's relevant to your location.

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. I am looking forward to seeing major social nets (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, FriendFeed) and other data and news sites (Google Maps, Digg, CNN, Eventful), add Fire Eagle support.

The business
Asked what was in this initiative for Yahoo, there are two official answers. Yahoo co-founder David Filo told me, "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 czar 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.

Yes, advertisers. While Fire Eagle will not be advertising-supported, marketers could create location-based programs that use the service. The Yahoo team is adamant that Fire Eagle will be permission-based, though, so users won't end up giving their location away to services without their knowledge.

Previous coverage:
You are here, sort of.
Fire Eagle geolocation service: Halfway there.
Fire Eagle's missing apps.

Tom Coates, creator of Yahoo's Fire Eagle data location broker, took the stage at Where 2.0 to talk up some of the cool new apps that use the platform. "Fire Eagle is nothing," Coates said, without the apps. Nearly all the apps he mentioned are listed on the Fire Eagle's Gallery page (log-in required), but what I thought was more interesting were the apps he mentioned that don't support Fire Eagle yet, but should. Or that simply don't exist:

The Spot Satellite Messenger is a handheld device that reports your position, anywhere in the world, every 10 minutes. It gets your data from GPS and reports it via the commercial satellite phone network. It sends data to Google Maps but really cries out for a Fire Eagle link, Coates said. (Likewise the Isaac Daniels Compass GPS-equipped shoes--yes, they appear to be real.)

Coates wants Last.fm to get geo-enabled. He sees two use cases. First, he'd like to be able to look into his personal playlist and see not just what he played and when, but where. Second, he thinks it'd be very cool to see group data on geo-coded music preferences: Which music is popular in a given neighborhood or building, for example. Sounds like a job for the Wi-Fi-equipped Zune player. Too bad Microsoft and Yahoo fell out.

Coates hinted that Yahoo is working on a friend locator widget for its Yahoo Widget Engine. This app, run on a PC or Mac, would show you when your friends are on their PCs nearby. A special case of this app is the "Boss Proximizer," which warns you when your supervisor is nearby. ("It's coming," Coates said, "Trust me.") I'd like to see location widgets for more popular platforms--like OS X, Vista, and Google.

Coates also wanted to see integration into Twitter, so Fire Eagle could post your location when you wanted it to. This may be along soon, via Whrrl (story), a geolocation service that will work with Skyhook Wireless' Wi-Fi location finder, Loki. And Loki, it happens, works with Fire Eagle.

Previous coverage: You are here, sort of.

Spring is an exciting time for tech. A slew of products that have been hibernating in development cocoons are ready to emerge just in time for the flora to wake up, the the sun to turn on (at least here in the northern hemisphere,) and for techies to regain that bounce in their step. Here are eight downloads and Web applications we expect to see frolicking across computer screens this spring.

But why stop there? CNET editors have also slaved to bring you details galore on the season's top gadgets. Check out the latest in cameras, phones, laptops, and gaming gear here.

Yahoo's Fire Eagle service is very much in its infancy, but we're already beginning to see some early developer applications pour out of the service. One of them, Wikinear is a smart mashup, combining Google Maps with Wikipedia. Every time you update your location on Fire Eagle, the map and related entries will change, which could be useful if you're traveling or feel like learning more about some of the buildings or attractions around you.

The site is optimized for mobile phones with simple text and links. While local services such as Yelp offer quite a bit more story telling and every day value for local attractions than even the largest Wikipedia entry, this is a fairly simple way of seeing an encyclopedic view of what's around you at any given time.

Note that you need to be a Fire Eagle private beta tester to use Wikinear, although if you've got Google Earth installed, you can get the same results by toggling the Wikipedia layer found in Layers -> Geographic Web and navigating to wherever you are.

[via Compiler]

Just a quick post, before I get on a plane, to point out that Dopplr has implemented integration with FireEagle. As I've said before, the variable resolution feature is pretty cool.

Now you can update your Dopplr location through FireEagle.

Thanks, Ross (via Twitter)

At ETech this morning, a nervous Tom Coates announced that Yahoo's geolocation service Fire Eagle was leaving the nest, and he began handing out invitation codes to the product's private beta.

Fire Eagle, as we've written previously, is a storehouse for personal location information. It has a cool feature of revealing that information at various resolutions depending on what the person being located wants to reveal, and to whom. We think it's an important new service, sort of a geo-counterpart to the upcoming Social Graph API that Google is spearheading (read: OpenSocial, the simple version).

If you're curious to see what Fire Eagle can offer, though, ignore today's news about it. Fire Eagle itself does not, yet, have a useful interface. But since it's now open to developers, we should see cool apps soon. We heard this morning that Dopplr will have Fire Eagle integration shortly, and that the Bug Labs geolocation module will support the API. We'll report on these new applications when they show up for trials. Update: Dopplr has implemented the link to Fire Eagle. Very cool.

Your location checks in...

But it don't check out. Yet.

Read also:
TechCrunch: Yahoo's "Twitter For Location" Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality.
ReadWriteWeb: Location Aware: Smart Rollout for Yahoo! Fire Eagle.

Where are you right now? It's a simple question for humans to ask and answer, but for Web services, location is a complex and sometimes fuzzy concept. Right now, I'm in San Francisco, and I don't care who knows it. Where in San Francisco? That's not so public. I started writing this at home, with a specific address that I don't want to print here but that I'm OK with my friends knowing. Where's my house? It's in the Noe Valley neighborhood. Although, a real estate agent might be able to get away with saying I'm in Twin Peaks.

There are two interesting projects that are making headways into handling the ambiguity of location and the conditional access most people want to assign to theirs.

Fire Eagle

First, there's the Yahoo Brickhouse project, code-named Fire Eagle. It's a location information clearinghouse. The idea is that you (or your application) tells it where you are, and then it conditionally releases that information to other apps and people. It handles data at varying levels of granularity going in and out. For example, if you have a GPS-equipped cell phone feeding it data, it will get precise info about where you are. But if you're using Facebook to update your location and you just type "San Francisco," it knows a lot less. In the latter case, it will denote your location as a bounding box framed by several latitude/longitude coordinates, in this example the boundaries of the city of San Francisco.

Your location info is locked in to the Fire Eagle data store and is only released to the apps and the people who you authorize, and only at the detail level that's OK with you. For example, you can specify that photos being fed in to Flickr with Fire Eagle data (the project was based on Zone Tag for photos) get the most precise data, but that location data about you, from your cell phone, is doled out differently to different people: Your spouse can see exactly where you are, perhaps, but random Facebook friends can only tell what city you're in--or maybe only what state.

Fire Eagle will be a set of APIs designed for developers, but Brickhouse's Salim Ismail showed me how it will also have controls for users, so they can grant or deny access to their data from specific applications, and set the granularity level for various people or groups.

Google's OpenSocial API also supports location data, but the Fire Eagle really looks like a complete and robust solution for collecting and distributing geo data. I predict a lot of Web apps will use it. It should be released to public shortly, and will likely be renamed.

What's in this for Yahoo? As Ismail says, "It enables us to provide superior services." In other words, ads. Not directly, of course. But services that use the API will be able to deliver more targeted messages to their users.

Urban Mapping

Fire Eagle handles fairly unambiguous data about location. For location data that's open to interpretation, there's another company, Urban Mapping, in the business of resolving the ambiguity. Urban Mapping has a database that knows that one person's Marina District is another's Cow Hollow, and that any specific address will actually exist in multiple neighborhoods, depending on whom you ask. Since many commerce and tourism sites locate businesses by neighborhood, getting this information right is a big deal. Urban Mapping tracks the social agreements that loosely define the boundaries of neighborhoods, and supplies that data to travel and business-finder sites. The Urban Mapping team keeps up with new colloquial neighborhood names (like RAMBO in New York and SOFA in Miami) and can place business in those locations, as a Web service, to its customers. My favorite restaurant-finder site, OpenTable is, sadly, not yet a customer.

Speaking of overlapping information, Urban Mapping got its start making lenticular city maps. As you tilted the map toward or away from you, you would see different layers of info, like subways, streets, or neighborhood names. CEO Ian White is planning to bring this cool product back soon, but in the meantime he's nursing his neighborhood disambiguation service, which is already cashflow positive.