Yahoo has just announced the general availability of Fire Eagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net), an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.
Fire Eagle gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers clear protocols for updating or accessing that information. Because it’s open, any networked service can use Fire Eagle to respond to a user’s location – to help them find their friends, annotate the world or find nearby services or local information.
“Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location,” said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo! Brickhouse. “We’re here to help people take their location to the Web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with.”
Services built on Fire Eagle during the private beta period include: Brightkite, Dash, Dipity, Dopplr, ekit, Lightpole, Movable Type, Navizon, Outside.in Radar, Pownce, Loki, SPOT, ZKOUT.
Having said that, I’m sure the next thing that comes to one’s mind is if and how this new-found wealth of user information will be used by agencies and advertisers.
While the initiative in itself is laudable and it may be taking us one step forward towards consolidating our online presence, I anticipate this to be a possible hot potato in terms of enabling new dimensions of user and behavioral targeting. It’s hard to believe that Yahoo will resist the temptation, giving the not-too-enviable position they currently have on the market.
