Comments on: Yahoo’s “Twitter For Location” Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality

By: Yahoo Hires Former Twitter Chief Architect Blaine Cook

Yahoo Hires Former Twitter Chief Architect Blaine Cook — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:15:55 +0000

[...] which we’ve described as a “Twitter for location” was first announced in November 2007 and is currently in private [...]

By: Lightpole Implements Fire Eagle, Helps You Get to Know the World Around You | crown.MONKEY

Thu, 24 Apr 2008 09:35:56 +0000

[...] phone users, mostly regarding information related to points of interest (POIs). Fire Eagle, which launched last month, is Yahoo’s geo-information platform, which allows users to update their current [...]

By: Lightpole Implements Fire Eagle, Helps You Get to Know the World Around You

Lightpole Implements Fire Eagle, Helps You Get to Know the World Around You — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 13:13:28 +0000

[...] its application’s geolocation capabilties using Yahoo’s Fire Eagle (more here), which launched last [...]

By: Upcoming.org Founder Creates Fireball (Fire Eagle + DodgeBall + Twitter)

Upcoming.org Founder Creates Fireball (Fire Eagle + DodgeBall + Twitter) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 07:06:02 +0000

[...] keep track of where their friends are on your mobile phone. It uses Yahoo’s Fire Eagle as a geo-location broker and Twitter. It is basically mashup of the two services, plus some functionality from Upcoming.org. [...]

By: WEBclusive » Blog » FireEagle beta gelanceerd - Gecentraliseerde Geo-service

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 14:05:53 +0000

[...] Met het verzenden van een mailing naar naar een selecte groep geinteresseerden, heeft Yahoo Fire Eagle officieel in een beta-stadium gebracht. De verwachtingen waren hoog gespannen, zeker na de aankondiging in oktober op de Future of Web Apps conferentie in Londen, maar helaas is de service met weinig functionaliteit gelanceerd. [...]

By: Daniel Chege

Daniel Chege — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:28:36 +0000

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

By: TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Get a FireEagle invite while they’re hot

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 09:35:25 +0000

[...] one-time invitation codes and can’t be reused. To find out more about FireEagle check out Michael Arrington’s story and the longer review, but essentially FireEagle is a platform for controlling people’s location [...]

By: Fredrik

Fredrik — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 13:00:31 +0000

GpsGate has a free “Buddy tracker” app. including web services interface for mashups and other integration. see http://gpsgate.com

By: Links 07.03.08 - “Twitter for Location”, Best Geek Hotels in the World 2.0, Simple translation tool » tourism marketing blog, online and destination marketing for travel and hospitality, internet and digital experiences

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 08:13:37 +0000

[...] Follow Techcrunch coverage Dopplr post announcing integration [...]

By: Yahya Cheema

Yahya Cheema — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 09:03:59 +0000

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!

By: Diego

Diego — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 08:31:20 +0000

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

By: martin english

martin english — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 03:48:13 +0000

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.mart...gle-and-twitter

By: Kirby

Kirby — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 01:57:38 +0000

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.

By: Andrew Zarick

Andrew Zarick — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:57:00 +0000

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.

By: Jason Nelms

Jason Nelms — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 00:44:26 +0000

@ Greg

I tried using Plazes but its mapping is horrendous. It never puts the location in correctly.

By: Andrew J Scott

Andrew J Scott — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:34:40 +0000

@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://urbanhor...es-e-tech-2008/

By: chris

chris — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 23:00:10 +0000

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…

By: randy

randy — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:41:37 +0000

I’ve got a few more screens over here – http://www.flic...57604051115936/

Cheers,
Randy

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:02:48 +0000

It looks, dare I say, cute. Lovely interface.

By: James

James — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:00:51 +0000

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.

By: Henry Work

Henry Work — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:58:48 +0000

Justin: yeah, I was totally just kidding.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:48:35 +0000

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!

By: Justin

Justin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:44:29 +0000

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”.

By: DMo

DMo — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:18:45 +0000

I think they might have missed the bus on this.

http://www.whrrl.com

By: James

James — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 21:16:26 +0000

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.