Sunnyvale, California-based Web pioneer Yahoo hopes to spark a movement of online  applications that know where people are and provide new services to them and to friends, with Tuesday's public launch of a geographical location platform for users and developers called Fire Eagle. Yahoo said that the free and open Fire Eagle framework would use existing cell phone and mobile device technology to expand the Web with geo-aware services for those wishing to use them. Geo-Aware Expansion Had 50 Live Services At Launch More than 50 Web services have developed a myriad of applications using Fire Eagle during the past five months since Yahoo began a private test of the new platform, the embattled Web media giant said Tuesday evening during an unveiling featuring company co-founder David Filo. The other Yahoo co-founder, chief executive Jerry Yang, has been working to keep the firm independent during most of the past year, after failed takeover attempts by Microsoft and activist shareholders. Tuesday's launch of the ambitious Fire Eagle platform, which was aimed at developers as much as end users, appeared to be a signal that Yahoo was not looking back but toward a more location-aware Internet. "Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location," Tom Coates, head of product at the Yahoo San Francisco development arm known as the Brickhouse and former BBC technologist, said in a Tuesday statement announcing the platform. Fire Eagle was designed to allow anyone with a Yahoo login the ability to choose in one fell swoop how much or how little information to share with Web applications using the new platform. "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," added Coates, who has worked at the Sunnyvale firm since 2005. Circumventing Mobile Providers While Wooing Developers Yahoo users who chose to do so could have their cell phones automatically share their location with many applications simultaneously by using Fire Eagle, eliminating the time consuming process of updating various services on many Web sites one at a time, while those who wished to keep their location information private could use the  new framework to obscure it. "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," Yahoo said of the opt-in platform in Tuesday's announcement. The technology Fire Eagle chose to use essentially circumvented mobile phone service providers, who sometimes charge hefty fees to use information showing the location of their subscribers, and who are generally restricted by strict data protection policies. Some developers seeking to utilize geo-location information have found it difficult to bring that information into their applications, and the platform could be a boon to those willing to leave the infrastructure to Yahoo. Aside from cell phones and mobile devices, consumers were also able to update their location information on the Fire Eagle Web site. Initially the geo-location framework had not been incorporated into any of Yahoo's group of Web properties, however a future move towards making its own applications geo-aware was expected, Yahoo said. "We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo’s services," Filo told reporters during the launch Tuesday. "We’re still [in the] pretty early stages in this location stuff, but if we can get wide adoption of Fire Eagle across the Web we can become a leader," Filo added. Management settings allow Fire Eagle users to control how much information to share with each of the applications they use -- whether that is their exact location, the city they are in, or which postal ZIP code they are in -- as long as those programs were built to take advantage of the new platform, Yahoo said. "At any time they can hide themselves, change their sharing preferences or delete any of their stored information," Yahoo said in the Tuesday statement. Yahoo Geo-Location Platform Fire Eagle Takes To Flight The ability to selectively obscure location information was seen as an important safeguard, according to Coates. "We think it’s a good idea that users can lie about where they are. Like I don’t always tell my mother where I am," Coates said. Users of the Fire Eagle platform will be able to choose which applications to trust and which to skip, and a slew of choices were already operating when Yahoo announced the public launch Tuesday, offering features such as Brightkite's ability to track friends and Dash's alerts to avoid traffic congestion while driving. Steven Johnson, the co-founder of start-up Outside.in, said his firm has benefited from the geo-location features included in Yahoo's Fire Eagle. "The combination of Outside.in's new Radar feature and Fire Eagle's amazingly simple and powerful API means that our users can now see all the news and buzz within 1,000 feet of their current location, updated from any number of applications and devices," Johnson said. Some analysts see Fire Eagle as a precursor to a Yahoo system that could tie into targeted advertising system which would be able to deliver commercial messages based on a person's location. Related Links:
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