Today FireEagle launched as an invitation-only beta for developers to start testing. I think of it as a personal location service platform, but the more formal description comes from the announcement on the YDN blog:

Fire Eagle is an open location services platform offering web, mobile, and desktop developers a simple way to build new location-based applications while also ensuring that consumers have complete control over their data, including how, when and where their location is made available. Want to easily make your site responsive to a user's location? Or, maybe you've found a way to capture someone's location and you want to find cool apps to plug it into? By doing the heavy lifting and connecting you to a community of geo-developers, Fire Eagle makes it easier to build location-aware services.

Tom Coates was the ring leader for FireEagle and talks about it in this video shot earlier today at ETech 2008.

Don't be put off by the downer of a headline that TechCruch used ("Yahoo’s “Twitter For Location” Goes Into Private Beta With Near Zero Functionality"). I think that Mike Arrington either got the wrong message from someone or misunderstood what FireEagle really is today.

It's a location platform for developers to build on. It has an API that, among other things, lets you worry less about handling geo data and easily build in support for your web, desktop, or mobile application.

It's currently not aimed at end users or "consumers" (oh, how I hate that term). I'm sure the analogy to Twitter was intended to be a loose one.

Congrats to Tom and team for getting FireEagle out the door. :-)

VentureBeat has good coverage here: Yahoo’s FireEagle location service to launch publicly today

Oh, BTW... FireEagle uses OAuth for authentication!

Posted by jzawodn at March 05, 2008 02:27 PM

Reader Comments
# Adam Rosien said:

Ugh, the video has no shots of the screen!!

on March 5, 2008 05:20 PM
# Jeremy Zawodny said:

Adam, sorry... I'm sure we'll get some more video on-line. But that's what we were able to pull off at the conference.

on March 6, 2008 07:16 AM
# Abhishek Goyal said:

I have also felt lately that Techcrunch is maky mistakes way too often in their understanding of offerings. Seems like they are hiring too fast.

on March 7, 2008 02:01 PM
# said:

It is really going to be useful for us. thanks for the app.

on March 7, 2008 06:36 PM
# video conferencing said:

its really good for useing thans and best of luck from me to APP

on June 16, 2008 02:44 AM
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