New Yahoo! Platform for Sharing Location Announced
Yahoo has a “quickie” technology incubator (from which Pipes! evolved) called Brickhouse. Today it launches “a development platform, code-named FireEagle, that will eventually enable people to provide their location in one place and have that information distributed across multiple applications, such as social networks, microblogs and instant-messaging services. The data dissemination also can be automated with a GPS-enabled phone.” The idea is to “get more use” out of that location information - and I suspect - use it to make more money via LBS ads and services.
- CNET
The platform is in closed alpha testing now and should open for beta later this month. It’s built on Ruby on Rails and came out of Zonetag research. The location information, which can be explicitly given when the user wants to note it or generated automatically at regular intervals with a GPS-enabled device, is totally user managed. It can be shared with some services and not others, be deleted, etc. There are open APIs for taking and storing information and some 50 partners have been testing them out in secret for the past few months.
