Inside//Out: Fire Eagle

Location awareness has a lot of potential to tie the gap between digital and the physical world. The iPhone's integrated GPS clearly hints to the future of mobile social networking. Fire Eagle (a Yahoo product) aims to make updating your location easy.

The service is very simple and has only one true function. Tell the world where you are. Once you tell Fire Eagle where your location is, they allow third parties to tap in and use that same data. This way you don't have to update your location on 4-5 different sites, it is done automatically.

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Key Takeaways:

• Social utilities, like Fire Eagle, are going to make network convergence a reality
  
• The privacy settings that Fire Eagle uses are robust and should allay most fears of intrusion
  
• The open API they are providing developers has picked up the adoption rate and made some major players take notice
  
• Competition from Google/Apple/etc. will be quick to come about
  

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location, Matt Dickman, mobile, social media, Techno//Marketer, widgets, Yahoo, geolocation

Comments

[John Ratcliffe-Lee]

Good overview, Matt. Fire Eagle is a great, much-needed portal/location distribution tool. However, I've found a couple areas that it could do a bit to improve:

1) It certainly isn't my tool-of-choice for updating location. BrightKite remains this because it's UI is both more advanced and intuitive. FE's mobile interface is pretty lacking (caveat: BK has a specific iPhone interface and FE aims for broader mobile web platforms).

2) You don't have the option to search for a location before checking-in. Unless you know an exact address, it defaults to a general area (NYC for example) and uses that.

In the grand scheme of things, those are probably minor issues that don't have a strong tie to the service's overwhelming value proposition: aggregation. As you mentioned, the strong API and developer connections that let other services work seamlessly with is the real reason I use FE. From "anywhere" - in terms of the web or mobile version of whatever service I have paired, I can update location and FE takes care of the rest.