Development Seed Blog

Managing Your Locations in One Spot, with Great Control

Fire Eagle, Yahoo's new location sharing service, looks fantastic. My playing started when I tweeted asking if anyone had information on the invites. About 30 minutes later, Dan (geodaniel) dropped me an email with an invite and I got started.

Signing in was very easy because it directly integrates with my Yahoo account just like Flickr does.

The short is that Fire Eagle allows people to handle all their location information in one spot. You just type in your address, and you will be mapped.

You have fine grain control to manage what other apps (like Facebook or a user profile on Drupal) are allowed to access this data and how many details you want to share with these apps (street, state, country, and so on). It's also a two way API which means that apps can be built for you to update your location data in Fire Eagle from other spaces, again, like Facebook or a Drupal site. It's not another online community, but a walled garden buster for your location information to be managed in one space and used in many.

Since they've just launched, there are not a lot of apps integrating with Fire Eagle yet, but Dopplr is and it was very easy to set up, as you can see from the screenshots.

Here's how to do it.

Step 1:

Step 2:

Here is that granular control on an app by app basis!

Step 3:

Next will be to develop a Drupal module to allow our Drupal powered intranet to manage our locations and map them in our profile. We've talked about this before and we kept getting caught in the dilemma,  "do we do this on Drupal as a special geo feature" or "do we use something like Places that people already use?" It's nice to now have an answer to that question. 

Now we just need some more invite codes and some time :)

I congratulate the folks at Fire Eagle for a great start!