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.

http://blog.plazes.com/?p=220

now i can update fireball automatically from the plazer. yeah. fire eagle seems to get super useful.

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).

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.

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…

http://brightkite.com