Location sharing with Fire Eagle
This morning I received an invitation to join Fire Eagle – Yahoo’s location sharing application, so I’ve just been having a little play. I’d actually forgotten all about it since I saw a presentation about it at the FOWA last October and must’ve asked for a beta account then.
On it’s own Fire Eagle isn’t much use – but the idea is that you allow Fire Eagle compatible applications and devices to read and/or update your location, so you only have to update your location once for all the applications to know where you are at any time (subject to all the privacy settings available). So to actually try it out I downloaded the Loki toolbar – which can automatically update your Fire Eagle location based on your (wireless) network connection. Though I’ve installed it on my desktop PC so my location is unlikely to change much (I’ve not moved my desktop PC for nearly 2 years!) – but it did pick up my location reasonably accurately for what I assume is an IP based lookup (I’m actually about a mile from where it autodetects).
The privacy with an application such as Fire Eagle is a high priority (as I remember being mentioned in the FOWA presentation) and there are plenty of ways you can allow different applications different levels of privacy (e.g. how exact the locations are) – but then each application (as with Loki) has it’s own set of location sharing privacy options. All of which seems to make for a mind-boggling array of confusing options (in my mind anyway!).
My main reason in looking at Fire Eagle initially was to see whether we could hook MSG up to it, so your MSG location was auto-updated, so I’ll have a look into the Fire Eagle developer section and see how feasible and quick this will be to get set up.
