Remember DodgeBall, the early social mobile network that languished after Google bought it? So does Leonard Lin, a founding member of Upcoming.org who recently left Yahoo, where he organized Hack Days. He helped write the code for FireBall, a clever mobile geo-location app that brings back the promise of DodgeBall using only other existing services with public APIs.
FireBall is a way for people to 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. (Fire Eagle is a Yahoo service that is a centralized place to keep your location information so that other applications or devices can access it with your permission). People add all of their contacts on Twitter and authorize Fire Eagle to share their location with Fireball. “Instead of creating a new service that forces you to add all of your friends,” says Lin, “we end up using Twitter for messaging,”
When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a Fireball account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a Tiny URL link. When you click on the link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell phone and hows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration with Upcoming.org,
FireBall launches today in a private beta for attendees to the Web 2.0 Expo. The first 100 TechCrunch readers who are attending Web 2.0 Expo and send an email to “Fireballme+TechCrunch [at] gmail [dot] com” will recieive an invite. Right now, the service only works in San Francisco.
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What are the plans for the future?
Funny coincidence. We just launched our service, which does almost the same thing, but works worldwide, last week.
http://brightkite.com
I’d be happy to give invites to Brightkite for the first 100 TC readers who contact me (martin AT brightkite DOT KOM).
Congratulations Leonard. Sounds like a really cool mashup. Can’t wait to try it out on my next San Francsican jaunt, where I’ll probably end up tracking you down via Fireball.
Sounds like all the elements work, although I’m not sure how Fire Eagle works, which seems to be the most crucial moving part here. Can’t wait to try both…
Yeah, I got excited for a minute before I realized this is basically brightkite.
I’ll try this out, since social LBS is a great idea whose time has come, but brightkite looks a lot more mature.
Of course, the beautiful thing about Fire Eagle is that as long as their platform gets updated, it can be consumed by any number of services.
100 invites only…?! Looking forward to be able to subscribe to it..
This is going to be a huge hit on conferences - the twitter downtime during those can be a problem for them though. And btw. I’m not sure I want everybody to read: ‘Marcin tweeted “Enjoing free 5 minutes” from “restroom”‘.
Oh, hey there Martin! That reminds me, I need to go to bed. I will see you tomorrow.
As far as I know, also plazes.com just launched the integration with FireEagle, which makes their geo-location services even more interesting.
I think it will help users to communicate more easily, lets see when it will open from beta launch. Twitter is sure becoming a big hit.
So let me answer a couple of questions (as one of the guys behind fireball)…
Plans for the future: we have quite a few ideas for where we want to go with this, and what we want to do. As for it being similar to Brightkite… kinda, but we’re taking a bit of a different slant.
With regards the ‘not worldwide yet’ and ‘not out of beta yet’, that’s pretty much solely because fireball is, for Leonard, Kellan, and me, something we’re doing for fun, in addition to other commitments (Kellan works full-time on flickr, I work full-time for Yahoo! Europe as a webdev).
It could be incredible solutions to integrate the feeds through mobile social network.
plazes has also rolled out fire eagle support yesterday:
http://blog.plazes.com/?p=220
now i can update fireball automatically from the plazer. yeah. fire eagle seems to get super useful.
i think its odd that a yahoo product uses google maps..
@Auston Fireball is not a Yahoo! product.
Oh, and it uses Yahoo! Maps. Not Google Maps.
Hey guys, just to chime in w/ what Steve said, although I haven’t gotten a chance to check out Brightkite (sounds, great, waiting for my invite :).
While the end-user functionality might be similar, I think that the more interesting thing (the reason why I spent the past couple days coding this up) is in exploring what could be done with the idea of open data and web services. When the Twitter OAuth comes back up we’ll have a service that does stuff for you that doesn’t have *any* logins.
And, of course, with Fire Eagle, (why it’s so damn cool), not only do we update locations where any other app can get to it, but we’re doing periodic checkups, so that you don’t need to check in with Fireball at all if you have something else already automatically updating your location.
Looks interesting, although the mobile interface is limited to SMS commands, in San Fransisco, and limited to locations in Upcoming.com (when updating your location via Twitter at least). I’d like to understand whether Fireball will let users manage their privacy, and whether there is further functionality planned to turn this into a real mobile social network or just keep it as a basic location tracking tool.
Patrick: we fully intend to let users manage their privacy; that’s actually one of the most important problems to my mind. As for our intentions longer-term, we’re going to effectively pursue whatever we feel is a natural growth-path for Fireball. Initially, however, we’ll be sticking to using Twitter, Fire Eagle, and Upcoming as our data sources.