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Yahoo Launches Fire Eagle
John Musser, March 5th, 2008 
Comments(10)
Today at the O’Reilly ETech Conference in San Diego, Yahoo’s Tom Coates demonstrated their latest API, and perhaps their most unique API: Fire Eagle. It’s a platform for sharing your location online. It gives applications the ability to update, query and track your location, with user-driven privacy controls allow setting of location availability and granularity. We have created a new Fire Eagle API profile here. Yahoo’s site describes it as:
The secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy. We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.
This Yahoo diagram does a nice job of illustrating how applications can interact with the platform:
Here are some of the key details:
- It’s currently an invite only beta release (10,000 invitations sent today).
- Since privacy issues are naturally a top concern in any system capable of sharing your current location, the Fire Eagle platform has this built-in a very deep level. You can choose how specific a location to make available as well as how long to make this available (Fire Eagle can send you reminders).
- It’s unique in that it’s a pure platform play — there is currently no consumer-facing Yahoo app on top it.
- The REST-based API is one of the first from a major vendor to support OAuth as the authentication mechanism. One implication of this is that the application does not need to know the Yahoo ID of the user.
- The query API lets you retrive data in GeoJSON and GeoRSS formatted data.
- There are user-selectable levels of accuracy that range from neighborhood to country.
- The Dopplr service will be one of the first to use it.
- Initial sample apps from Yahoo will include a Fire Eagle widget badge for MySpace, an app for connecting with friends on Facebook, and an SMS updater for texting your location.
- The API includes user-specific methods like /update and /lookup, as well as general purpose methods like /recent.
- It keeps only the most recent piece of location information it received.
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[...] a number of cool things are built with it. Watch the video of it’s introduction, and then take a look here to quickly get an idea of the details. It would appear from the details that it was written in a [...]
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[...] Yahoo Launches Fire Eagle [...]
Comment by: Google Releases Contacts API - March 6th, 2008 at 4:02 am -
[...] Das dürfte eine sehr interessante Geschichte werden. Obwohl mir bei solchen Sachen immer gleich der große Bruder über die Schulter schaut lassen sich darauf doch sicherlich einige feine Anwendungen bauen, so Fire Eagle halten kann, was es verspricht. Natürlich gibt es auch heutzutage Anwendungen die den Standort des Nutzers nutzen, aber durchgestezt hat sich das alles noch nicht. Fire Eagle könnte ein Schritt in diese Richtung sein. [via] [...]
Comment by: Fire Eagle » Code Candies - March 6th, 2008 at 4:22 am -
Everyone that got 1 of the 10,000 invitations also got 4 additional keys to send there friends too.
Comment by: Bogdan Belcea - March 6th, 2008 at 5:36 am -
[...] Yahoo Launches Fire Eagle (tags: blog.programmableweb.com 2008 mes2 dia5 at_home api Yahoo! LBS) [...]
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As was put in the Code Project newsletter - “Great, a new way for stalkers to find you.” Who would use this? It will only be used AGAINST people. Please. This is why Google is winning the war: they are far more concerned about personal privacy than Yahoo! Won’t it be fun when you’re all a Microsoft division? Hubris indeed.
Comment by: Wink Jr. - March 6th, 2008 at 9:23 pm -
[...] on the heels of Yahoo’s launch this morning of their new Fire Eagle API, Google has just released their latest API, the Google Contacts Data [...]
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[...] on the heels of Yahoo’s launch this morning of their new Fire Eagle API, Google has just released their latest API, the Google Contacts Data [...]
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[...] This marks at least the second API from one of the major providers to now support OAuth: earlier this year, the innovative Yahoo Fire Eagle API integrated OAuth support. [...]
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[...] much anticipation since its private beta release in March, Yahoo! has made Fire Eagle publicly available. Fire Eagle is an open geo-location platform that [...]
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