Fights over the search market are far from over, but companies appear to have picked out the mobile market as their next battleground. And with a service known as FireEagle, Yahoo might well gain an early advantage on this front.
FireEagle will, with any luck, get a new name before it is brought out of alpha testing; the current moniker seems strange and unrelated to any concrete concept. Also, Yahoo surely doesn’t want to the guys at Firefox to get credit for this service; unlike some of Yahoo’s other offerings, FireEagle appears to have a lot of potential.
Michael Arrington writes, “It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.”
The usefulness of this service in combination with Flickr’s geotagging has already been noted, and developers are sure to think of a lot of other ways to have fun with concept. Privacy will be an issue (especially given Yahoo’s recent exchange with Congress), but users should be able to control FireEagle’s tracking abilities.
According to Arrington, FireEagle – or whatever it comes to be called – will launch within the next month.
