This morning Yahoo has released a pair of new applications that tap into Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s ambitious geo-location system that allows a wide variety of web services to share your location data (after being granted permission to do so). The new applications include a rich Facebook application called Friends on Fire and a Fire Eagle extension for Firefox that allows users to update their location directly from their browser without having to leave the site they’re viewing.
Of the two, Friends on Fire for Facebook is the more consumer-friendly. The application allows you to pinpoint your current location on a map, as well as view the location of your friends (shared either through the Facebook app or any of the other 70+ supported Fire Eagle services). You can also append notes to any point on the map regardless of your current location (for example, I could tag my favorite restaurants in San Francisco, or point out a park where my friends should meet up later). The bottom of the app offers a listing of your friends’ recent locations and notes, and the app can also optionally syndicate your actions to Facebook’s news feeds.
The Firefox extension works as advertised, offering a handy button at the bottom right corner of your browser that can be used to update your location. Unfortunately, getting it installed is a bit of hassle. Because it is an ‘experimental’ extension, you’ll need to first register with Mozilla. Then you’ll have to enter your Yahoo ID. If you don’t have Mozilla’s Geode location-services extension installed, you’ll need to grab that too. Given all of these hoops, I think the only people who are going to install this extension for now are the people that really want it. But once you’re set up, it works like a charm.
On the development side of things, Fire Eagle has also rolled out a number of new features. The service now supports a new ActionScript library that makes the service more accessible to Flash developers. Fire Eagle has also implemented support for XMPP (used by many instant messaging systems) to offer real-time updating. Finally, the service will soon be able to associate location coordinates with nearby restaurants and locations.
Fire Eagle continues to innovate, but it still faces some challenges, the largest of which is that most people probably don’t have too many friends who are using it quite yet. Geo-location is quickly gaining ground, but until it reaches critical mass the odds of randomly running into a friend for an impromptu get together are so low I doubt many people will take the time to manually update their location. And the fact that some these services are also segmenting their audiences (Google’s new Latitude service doesn’t play nice with Fire Eagle) isn’t helping.
That is pretty sweet in general – but I can see a whole slew of people using it for .. not so nice reasons. Say .. “hey, sneak out tonight and meet me here!” says the 50 yr old guy pretending to be a 15 yr old Catholic choir boy.
Looks interesting, I”ll definitely try this.
Yeah; It really looks interesting. I hope it won’t spoil my mood
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Hey, I also didn’t knew that Yahoo had a .net domain.
Well, .net is a very little bit difference from .com – whatever is on y.c is a mainstream applications, which are deep and seriously in production, y.n is applications, which has already came out of incubator (or are still there) and make their progress to main y.c (very rougly this is what Google calls “beta” – quite stable, usable, but not as good as we want it to be yet).
I’m really hoping Safari 4 will get as much developer attention as Firefox. Realizing it’s not as open to plugins and what not.
I don’t understand this need some people have, to let others know exactly where they are at all times! I can see how, in certain instances, this would be useful — you find a new restaurant and would like to mark it for future reference, or you’re drunk off your a$$ and need your friends to come pick you up — but, for the most part I think this stalker/voyeur trend is a little creepy!
Very interesting stuff from Yahoo. This seems to be one of the more recent times that I can remember them being right on point with Google. Their new geo locating tool has become popular and Yahoo’s, if it is as good as it appears, should challenge them. As more location based search and sharing technologies move to the forefront, it will be important for either Google of Yahoo to distinguish themselves here.
The add-ons of Firefox will change the world.
Geotagging’s growing, but it is not so popular among common people.
Too many spy movies I think.
Anyway it remains a great solution for webmarketing campaign of not all products, but many.
@Jason, seems like the stronger angle for the story is that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft have started to acknowledge the growing strengths of other platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and iPhone.
- Microsoft put Photosynth and games on iPhone; bought parts of Facebook; and expands their adnet.
- Google and Yahoo engineering teams use Twitter.
- Now, Yahoo supplies Facebook apps.
I’m sure you can find more examples from your archive. The web is so pervasive that no single company can service all the needs. The current trend toward integration and cooperation makes more sense. Expanding Google Reader and myYahoo to take social network mindshare away from real social networks make no sense. Cooperation benefits users worldwide.
You can thank me later for this suggestion
Sounds like a lot of work for very little value. Too much of a hassle. Location based services should be more automatic and less intrusive. I’m not a big fan of these yet.
To Yahoo, enhance your search crawler first before doing new product launch.
To Yahoo: give up the lost fight on search first, then use those resources to launch other killer products where you can win.
Yahoo sat on Fire Eagle for too long and now are scrambling to catch up with services like Google Latitude and Brightkite.
You’ll be probably quite surprised, but the BriteKite supports FireEagle and in fact, it was one of the first applications ever to support it.
I think one of the biggest problems Fire Eagle has is that very few people understand what it is, including almost everyone who reports on it.
Fire Eagle is not a competitor to Bright Kite, Loopt or Latitude. It is trying to be the glue that ties such services together – it is a location broker service.
You don’t need any of your friends to use Fire Eagle in order to make use of it. I have my ekit Travel Journal set up to share locations with Fire Eagle. I also have my BrightKite account set up to use Fire Eagle. Now I can share my location when I travel with friends who visit my Travel Journal, or friends who use BrightKite.
fire eagle may be ok, but being tied to the craptastic yahoo maps, no thanks.
How much money will this make for Yahoo!… and when?
so sad, yahoo reduced to making addons for facebook
lol. That shows your ignorance if you were serious.
As I said above, it’s really great news, and this is exactly the case when “every little helps” – every new geo-application adds some more to amount of people who are using them, eventually it’ll gain a critical mass and then – we may see totally different social format, extensively used by everyone.
There is little doubt that these geo-locating systems will eventually become the norm. The question is when and by whom. As it continues to develop, I’ll follow it at this comprehensive digital security site, justaskgemalto.
Ho an another very interesting plug-in, like everytime with Mozilla ! Thanks !