The Yahoo! Geo Technologies Blog

On Tuesday the talented team at Brickhouse launched Fire Eagle, Yahoo!’s user location management platform, to loud acclaim.

I’ve been a huge fan of Fire Eagle since its inception — as a business driver it was conceived to slice horizontally through the vertical towers that now dominate the Location Based Services landscape. Its launch not only returns ownership of User Location to the hands of the user, but undoubtedly triggers the tearing out of hair and significant re-writing of business plans; this can only be good — opening user location ensures that new businesses are built on the opportunities this affords, and not on the ‘captive audience, closed service’ concepts that currently dominate.

The product ethos is focused wholly on protecting user privacy while exposing the power of location; this is what really is most impressive. While developers usually tout the ‘heavy lifting’ that Fire Eagle does to make geolocation appear easy (more on this below), I would suggest that Fire Eagle’s greatest success is the care and attention evident in the product to ensure that users have complete control over who has access to their location, and at what granularity this is exposed. Far from shying away from the complex and at times intractably confused technical and policy issues surrounding user location, privacy, and geolocation, the Fire Eagle Team has carefully met them head-on and delivered a well-conceived, innovative, and enabling technology. This is delicate ground, certainly, and each subsequent step must be taken with similar diligence, but I am very excited to see what new ideas, products, and businesses emerge from Open User Location.

I am, of course, hardly an unbiased observer: the Yahoo! Geo Technologies team provides the machinery that performs the aforementioned ‘heavy lifting’. Our tech helps Fire Eagle determine where on earth its users are, assists with its geographic granularity protection, and ensures that developers can integrate the geographic data returned by Fire Eagle with other systems via ‘where on earth’ IDs (WOEIDs) and our GeoPlanet Web service. In a similar manner we also power the geoinformatics underlying Flickr’s new geotagging service. Combined with the significant geo wizardry and craft of the Fire Eagle, Flickr, and other teams at Yahoo!, we are continuing to provide the tools and platforms to spatially enable the Web and provide our users with the most personally georelevant experience possible.

Tyler Bell, Advanced Products Manager, Yahoo! Geo Technologies

This entry was posted on Friday, August 15th, 2008 at 8:27 pm and is filed under Fire Eagle, Flickr, GeoPlanet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.