Technology

Yahoo! announced today that Fire Eagle - the open platform that allows users to manage and store information for developers - is now open. This new platform allows a networked service to use the platform and to respond to the users’ location in order to help them find friends, local information, or services that are in the area.

Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo! Brickhouse, said Fire Eagle is dedicated making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location. “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,” Coates said.

For users, Fire Eagle acts as an interface for managing location information and deciding how, and with whom, to share it. Automatically, users can authorize Web, mobile or desktop applications to update their location. Also, this open platform enables users to decide how much of that information to share with their favorite services, company officials say. Officials said at any time they can hide themselves, change their sharing preferences or delete any of their stored information.

Fire Eagle allows developers to focus on how they can use location in their services without having to build the infrastructure to know where their users are. Fire Eagle was built at Yahoo! Brickhouse, a home for start-up like projects inside Yahoo!. Since its private beta launch earlier this year, Fire Eagle has been integrated into over fifty live applications, including Dopplr, Pownce, Movable Type, and Outside.in.

“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,” said Steven Johnson (News - Alert), co-founder of Outside.in.
“Fire Eagle allowed us to easily add location data to Pownce using their simple API,” said Leah Culver, co-founder of Pownce.