Yahoo FireEagle - A Platform Service For Geo Information
Michael Arrington
29 comments »
Yahoo isn’t just announcing Kickstart this evening. Salim Ismail’s Brickhouse is announcing a very useful new platform service tonight tentatively called FireEagle, which is currently in closed alpha testing. The team is working on the launch name and final launch date now - it’s expected to be open later this month.
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.
Then other applications can take that data with your permission and build it directly into their service.
This is perfect for services like Flickr, which still struggle to get users to add lat/long information to photos (With FireEagle, Flickr could just look at the time stamp on photos and note where you were on FireEagle at that time). FireEagle can also benefit by working with established place-blogging services like Plazes, both by giving and receiving geo information on users.
The service will have open APIs for both adding and taking information. Ismail says they have been working with 50 or so third party developers in secret over the last couple of months, many of whom will have applications using FireEagle ready to go on the official launch date.
I was able to take a few camera phone pictures during a demo of the product last week at Brickhouse. The resolution isn’t great (in fact it’s terrible), but you can get a feel for what the platform will look like. I’ve also included a shot of a Facebook application, below.
I think I can safely say that there are a ton of developers who are going to be extremely excited about FireEagle.
Am I the only one that saw this and thought that if Ze Frank were still doing The Show, the next Fire Eagle Danger Day would focus on Yahoo’s handing user info over to the Chinese government?
Facebook??
You kidding me… Stop putting Facebook & Google wars. You jackasses!
associate a geotag with a username? did this take more than two hours to create?
Spy photo… Do companies give you permission take spy photo?
the double “e” in that name is nasty.
Funny enough I’ve had no less than 3-4 conversations about this idea in the last 2 days.
this is all getting a little too Big Brother for my liking.
This dances on the very fine line between creepy and exciting…
Given that PHPs sinventor Rasmus Lerdorf wirks for Yahoo I find it quite interesting that Yahoo gets its feet wet with Ruby on Rails. Also, if this catches on I am looking forward to see the dev team’s comments on the RoR stigma that never seems to go away “but does it scale?”.
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Is someone’s screen capture functionality broken?
Michael, watsup with the screen photos?
Now Yahoo can think up some good names!
They just thought about driving, mingled two tire names: FireEagle!
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
Rather than this being a ‘direct’ service, it sounds more like a back-end tool you plug into some other web application.
Still pretty interesting, none the less…
Michael @ 9
Given that IBM is so heavily invested in Java, I find it quite interesting that IBM get its feet wet with PHP…..
Seriously, all large companies use a variety of technologies. Everyone is tinkering with everything and largely, it’s down to the individual developers preference of a new service. Nothing to see here….
I found out about FireEagle at BarCamp Atlanta a while ago and it sounded pretty interesting then and still is. I’m just waiting to take real advantage of it a GPS device.. but iPhones don’t like connecting to bluetooth GPS devices.
Sounds like we’re finally going to get something that I wanted when I first saw Total Recall in 1990. Permission-based geo locating that would actually benefit people is something that’s going to happen — the thing is figuring out how to do it responsibly and safely.
@ #16
It’s just a more accurate version of IP address-based geolocation, which millions of website already use.
Very keen to try my hands on this. I’ve been working on Windows Mobile and integrating cell tower locations with Jaiku updates and similar. Theoretically you could use cell tower lookups as a GPS-like data source for mapping software.
I am questioning how this is such a masterpiece?
I have recently developed a system similar to this in .NET, which tracks my companies GPRS devices using a range of WMS’s, and am wondering why it is labled as such a breakthrough?!?
Because it’s open! and it seems the location information will be re-usable through geoRSS feeds or another API…
This is very similar to the Hostip.info Geolocation open-source project. They’ve been doing this for years. http://www.hostip.info/
Location is a serious issue for a whole range of mobile apps (ours included). So an open platform could be quite interesting indeed. Especially when you consider that this gives users the convenience of a single point from which they control access to their location data across multiple applications.