What is Yahoo!'s Fire Eagle and should I care?

For several years now, location-based services have been touted as the next big revolution the Internet has to offer your average consumer. And, whilst many have speculated on the possibilities, nobody has been able to bridge the divide between theory and practice to make them a real possibility. Until now.

Fire Eagle is a new location-tracking service from Internet giants Yahoo! Users simply create a Fire Eagle account and then feed as little or as much data to the service as they wish. Fire Eagle then disseminates this information to any applications that request it - typically at the user's prompting; "where can I find a local coffee shop?" for instance.

Fortunately, as Fire Eagle is developed by a user-centric company like Yahoo!, privacy is core to the service. Currently, the Fire Eagle user control panel lets you share as specific or general information as you wish with requesting services. So you could choose to share just the city you're walking around in today, or the exact GPS co-ordinates right now.

At the moment, users must manually update their location using either the Fire Eagle dashboard or via a special Twitter account. Twitter is an emergent micro-blogging platform, where friends can connect and post 140 character (or less) messages to let people know what they're up to, or to share something interesting they may have seen online as a link for others to click on.

However, Yahoo! is presently working on several other more considered interfaces for Fire Eagle - notably a dedicated Fire Eagle mobile site and, more significantly, a Facebook application. Yahoo! are promising that the Fire Eagle application in Facebook will allow you to coordinate with friends in real-time, as well as find related groups or other interesting items in your local area.

Additionally, Yahoo! are working on at least one Fire Eagle mobile phone application, which will automatically send your current location to Fire Eagle as often as you wish. The slight draw-back with this is that you will require a phone with built-in GPS in order to plot your location automatically.

As of writing, adoption of the Fire Eagle service by users is being tightly controlled by Yahoo!, using the now-ubiquitous "invite only" private beta test route. Coupled with the non-linear user location update process (see above), there are no major service offerings connected to Fire Eagle as yet. But Yahoo! have certainly captured people's attention with Fire Eagle and it's already becoming clear that Yahoo! could (finally) realise the potential of location-based services.

3Sixty has already taken a look under the bonnet of Fire Eagle and we're looking forward to getting stuck into location-based services during the rest of 2008.