TechCrunch reports that they’re also premiering FireEagle, a geotagging platform. Arrington describes its use:

It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.

The other details about FireEagle:

• Written in Ruby on Rails
• Open APIs
• Developed with the help of dozens of developers—so apps should be ready at launch.

Arrington says that this service will be perfect for integration with products like Flickr for easier geotagging as well as placeblogging platforms.

Also important to note: you have full control over your privacy here—you can turn off tracking, and delete some or all of your history. Yahoo said that deleted information will be “immediately removed from their servers.”

FireEagle’s launch date hasn’t been set, but it’s expected to be out later this month.

Comments

FireEagle will, with any luck, get a new name before it is brought out of alpha testing; the current moniker seems strange and unrelated to any concrete concept.  Also, Yahoo surely doesn’t want to the guys at Firefox to get credit for this service; unlike some of Yahoo’s other offerings, FireEagle appears to have a lot of potential.

Michael Arrington writes, “It is a platform for controlling people’s location information.  Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location.  Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.”

The usefulness of this service in combination with Flickr’s geotagging has already been noted, and developers are sure to think of a lot of other ways to have fun with concept.  Privacy will be an issue (especially given Yahoo’s recent exchange with Congress), but users should be able to control FireEagle’s tracking abilities.

According to Arrington, FireEagle – or whatever it comes to be called – will launch within the next month.