WebProNews

Location awareness at the core of the new technology

Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator opened its latest work: Fire Eagle, a location data management platform for web applications.

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.