The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog

With this post we’re starting a series of occasional or irregular interviews with people who are active within the Geo, Location and Place domain and who we think you’ll like to read about.

Our first interview is a much welcomed addition to the Yahoo! Geo Technologies group, Tom Coates, who is the creator and public face of Fire Eagle, the ground breaking location broker service that originated in Yahoo’s Brickhouse technology incubator in San Francisco.

Tom, welcome to the Geo Technologies group and thanks for taking the time to talk to us.

1. Many journalists, commentators and pundits seem to think that 2009 will be geo’s big year and that the location space will break out and go mainstream. How do you see geo, location and LBMS developing during the year?

I see the same kinds of potential in location as we saw in social networks a few years ago. Social networks by themselves aren’t terribly interesting, but you can splice together social stuff with pretty much every other service on the internet and then it gets interesting. Flickr was photos plus social, Delicious was bookmarks plus social.

I think geo’s going to go in a similar direction, pretty much every site on the internet would be improved if it was able to respond to where a user was in some way. Imagine Facebook but with the added ability to see your friend was wandering through your neighbourhood. Imagine search which knew what neighbourhood you were in and what articles were written in or about that area. Imagine if you could filter your e-mail by stuff you sent at work or stuff you received from people in America.

Now at the moment a bunch of this stuff is possible but it’s still quite complicated. You can almost see each round of work in geo as being pushes towards simplicity; making it easy for people to capture and share their location and understand the world around them through the prism of geo. You never quite know when something’s going to be easy enough to go mainstream, but we’re definitely moving in the right direction.

2. The concept of Fire Eagle seems blindingly obvious given hindsight. How did the idea of Fire Eagle come about?

I was part of a tiny team in the UK collaborating with Yahoo’s Berkeley research labs who came up with the Zonetag idea. We fell in love with the idea of a sensor in your pocket that knew where you were and could, with your permission, put that information into the cloud where it could be used all over the place.

We started off exploring that idea, what kinds of things could sites do if they had access to your location. That led us to the second major theme of Fire Eagle, how to make sure that people had enough control about how their information was stored and shared. We recognised pretty quickly that location based services were going to be a bit freaky for people initially, but then ten years ago you could say the same thing about the Internet generally! And the potential seemed (and seems) enormous.

3. What new features for Fire Eagle are you planning that you are able to share with us?

We’ve got a few things that you can expect to see in the near future including some user-facing stuff that I want to keep a bit secret at the moment. We’ve also got some new stuff for developers on the horizon including some new libraries. We’ve also got a very early beta of our new XMPP interface up and running now (ask on the Fire Eagle Mailing List if you’d like to have a play with that). Seth Fitzsimmons, who runs the engineering side of the project, has done amazing cutting-edge stuff with XMPP recently, and I think it’s going to open up a whole new raft of real-time APIs.

The short version of the XMPP story is that rather than a site having to query Fire Eagle every few minutes to keep track of where someone is, they can subscribe to their updates and we’ll ping them every time the user moves. It should make everything much more responsive and exciting.

The other area we’re still considering is location history. Initially we were very nervous about giving people the ability to store where they’d been, but it’s been one of the most common requests from users and developers. If we do it, we’ll make sure it’s an opt-in service.

There are a few other things going on, but I think I’d like to keep a few things as surprises!

4. One of the key features of Fire Eagle is that it allows a great variety of apps to feed location information into the platform and to consume that location. This has allowed a rich and varied ecosystem to coalesce around Fire Eagle; what are your favourite Fire Eagle app or apps?

I have an iPhone and I absolutely love the Sparrow Fire Eagle updater. The iPhone has a few limitations for us; we’d love the apps to be able to broadcast your location automatically every few minutes and the iPhone can’t do that, but it’s still been the platform that’s seen the most Fire Eagle updaters. They’re all good in different ways; some give you more information and some less, but Sparrow is my favourite.

There’s an app we’re working on at the moment that I think could be huge, but I’m not ready to talk about that. I love the way that Dipity has integrated Fire Eagle into their timelines. Dopplr was with us at the beginning and I think their Fire Eagle integration is really well done and surprisingly useful if you’re travelling a lot. We’ve got plugins for Movable Type and Wordpress too, which I really love. It’s great to be able to display your location on your blog.

What else … the BBC’s Radio Pop is cool. Outalot is really simple, but useful. Outside.in… The one I really miss is Pownce though. They had one of the most interesting ideas from my perspective, geocoding all of your messages and letting you explore what people were saying by place. I was really disappointed when they shut their doors. I hope people saw what they did and think about running with it. It was really lovely.

5. These apps already exist but there but what apps would you like to see emerge?

I think there are people out there working on an automatic updater for Android already, but I haven’t had a play with it yet. I’d love to see a really shiny, backgroundable updater there. I’d like to see Fire Eagle integrated into a few Twitter clients; I think we’re a natural fit for broadcasting your status. I think there are all kinds of possibilities for geo-gamers. I’d like to see more people playing with Fire Eagle as a way to geotag stuff they’re making – like bookmarks, blog posts, twitter messages. I’d really really love to see Last.fm playing with Fire Eagle to get a real-time sense of what people are listening to in different places. An iPhone-based friend-finder would also be nice! God the possibilities….

6. New and innovative web platforms often engender a whole plethora of competitors and imitators; are there any that you see as competing with Fire Eagle?

I don’t think Fire Eagle really has any direct competitors as such; our main job is to make it easier for other people to make sites and services, or even pieces of hardware, that are able to react to where you are. I don’t think anyone out there is doing anything as open or as flexible as we are, or as focused on giving users control over their data and privacy. Services like Loopt and Google’s Latitude app are pretty cool and I think we probably overlap in several areas, but honestly I still think we’re different enough to complement each other.

Thanks Tom. Fire Eagle is a key part of the Geo Technologies group products and location strategy and we look forward to seeing the
platform go from strength to strength.

Gary Gale, Head of UK Engineering, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

Photo credits: Tom Coates on Flickr

Tags: Android, brickhouse, Delicious, Dipity, Dopplr, Facebook, FireEagle, Flickr, Interview, Last.fm, Latitude, Loopt, MoveableType, Outalot, Outside.in, Pownce, Sparrow, TomCoates, twitter, WordPress, XMPP, ZoneTag

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2009 at 11:38 am and is filed under Geo Technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.