A note regarding the authenticity of the Yahoo document: this does indeed seem to be the real thing.  A product called myM that it mentions fell off the map a long time ago, and the scope of the "sunset" list is a little hard to swallow, but Chief Product Officer Blake Irving has threatened to fire whoever leaked it, which lends a distinct air of authenticity.

So to move on to the document itself . . . .   AlltheWeb, AltaVista, Delicious, MyBlogLog, myM, Yahoo Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, and Yahoo Picks are all supposed to be cut.

Then Fire Eagle, FoxyTunes, Sideline, Upcoming, Yahoo Events, and Yahoo People Search are supposed to be merged.

This signals a significant change in Yahoo’s strategy.  Streamlining on this scale may save the company lots of money, but could also harm its visibility and reputation while resulting in an unfortunate number of layoffs.

One other, completely speculative, thought: we may be witnessing Carol Bartz’s last stand as she tries to convince critics that she’s turning the company around and should be allowed to remain in charge.

Hat tip goes to Liz Gannes, who noted that MyBlogLog founder (and former Yahoo employee) Eric Marcoullier was the first person to link to the leaked document on Twitter.

How much do people want to share with their friends? If it extends to where they are and when they are there, Yahoo’s next project emerging from Brickhouse may fill the need.

Services like the Movable Type blogging platform and social media site Pownce both support Fire Eagle, Yahoo’s solution to location data management. Fire Eagle’s implementation for an application allows users to control how much of what they share, and who gets to see where they are.

Yahoo opened the platform and placed support for it at the hands of developers. Through the API for Fire Eagle, developers make their applications aware of their user’s locations; this enables them to provide content relevant to their locale.

Fire Eagle naturally carries a mobile component, an essential bit of any location-based service. With thousands of people carrying web-capable devices like the iPhone and a host of other handsets, Fire Eagle support within an application broadens its appeal beyond the desktop.

Yahoo said Fire Eagle picked up support from over fifty applications during a private beta period, as sites in addition to Pownce and Movable Type experimented with the technology. Social networking and traffic & travel-related applications emerged, but we expect to see Fire Eagle take off in adoption as developers figure out how to monetize what they can deliver based on location to their users.

 Christian Heilmann

The 3.5-hour event was, after all, named the Fire Eagle Developer Evening.  Exactly 80 people self-reported themselves as having shown up, and even if Yahoo’s Christian Heilmann put the number closer to 50, he also wrote, "All in all it was a great evening . . . and hopefully we’ll see a lot of great applications using Fire Eagle coming out of it."

Assuming everything works correctly, Fire Eagle promises to be one of Yahoo’s most interesting technologies.  A mashup involving Twitter has already become quite popular within certain circles, and all sorts of practical (finding food) and fun (finding friends) things are in the planning stages.

Yahoo also seems prepared on the privacy front; the company realizes that catching up with your pals in the real world is cool, but having random people follow you would be less so.

On the Yahoo Developer Network blog, Heilmann wrote, "Tom [Coates] walked the audience through the benefits of the OAuth authentication standard and its implementation in Fire Eagle.  Another point he made very clear is that creating a location-based application is quite a responsibility and that any developer for Fire Eagle should abide to their code of conduct."

Unfortunately, no news was shared about when Fire Eagle might exit its private beta, yet more developer evenings are on the way.