WebProNews

Any event that involves free pizza and beer can't be bad, but a recent Yahoo-sponsored get-together seemed especially successful, and this could bode well for the company's location-based Fire Eagle service.

 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.