Yahoo is turning its attention towards location based services with a new bit of software by the name of Fire Eagle, designed to help those with a fondness for social networking and the like to store and share their location information and settings only with those services they see fit.
it’s a web platform, so users can access it over their PC as well as their mobile and developers can build applications on top of it – apparently over 55 have already been built during Fire Eagle’s beta phase (the developer site is here.)
Privacy issues have always dogged location based services, so Yahoo gets extra bonus points for building features into Fire Eagle that let users govern who gets to know where they are at any point in time. Extra bonus points for allowing people to be able to delete their info – too many web companies are holding on to data they shouldn’t be.
We've had the ability to offer location based services to blackberry and smartphones for over 2 years. Also we introduced the notion of protected fields so that the user was always in control over their entire data not just their location based information. The major difference between us and Yahoo is that anyone one with a web server can plug-in our apache module (mod_mobile) and deliver location based services via simple mash-ups.
Cheers,
Peter
Fire Eagle is genius. I've been using it for ages with various apps, and it's solid. I like the granularity of visibility it gives you.
/m
Fire Eagle is genius. I've been using it for ages with various apps, and it's solid. I like the granularity of visibility it gives you.
/m
We've had the ability to offer location based services to blackberry and smartphones for over 2 years. Also we introduced the notion of protected fields so that the user was always in control over their entire data not just their location based information. The major difference between us and Yahoo is that anyone one with a web server can plug-in our apache module (mod_mobile) and deliver location based services via simple mash-ups.
Cheers,
Peter
Fire Eagle is genius. I've been using it for ages with various apps, and it's solid. I like the granularity of visibility it gives you.
/m