Scott Moody's Library tagged FireEagle →  View Popular

Interfacing a Rails App to Fire Eagle Pt 1: Exploration via IRB

Here are my notes as I explore interfacing a Rails app to Fire Eagle. Tokens have been masked to protect the innocent :)

I've been waiting eagerly for FireEagle. It launched at ETech (video & Radar post). It's Yahoo's service for brokering locations. The app itself is very simple and clear; it's the way it should be because it can be used to make some very big mistakes. As I've written before:

My location is important information -- to me, my friends and many, many unknown-to-me third-parties. As it becomes possible to be located (through GPS, wi-fi, cell towers) sharing that information will become very, very easy. This can be a good thing or become one of the most annoying things that you've ever done to yourself (ads, spam, ex's). Because of the high-risk of self-inlficted abuse having an easy way to set permissions on this information is going to become very important.

So when and why will you use FireEagle? My answer is Now. I already have tons of disparate services and contraptions that can know my location (my iPhone, my Loki toolbar, Dopplr, Tripit, DodgeBall... the list goes on); the problem is that my location is trapped within each one of them. I have different friends on different networks and I have different tools on different networks. Fire Eagle provides me a way to funnel all of the inputs together, compare them by date-stamp and then share out the appropriate levels of accuracy to applications.