Wade Roush's Library tagged yahoo →  View Popular

A couple days ago, a friend of mine sent me an invite for Fire Eagle, Yahoo! Research Berkley’s nifty closed-Alpha location storage and query engine, and I’ve been hooked ever since. For the rest of you without access, here’s a brief overview of what FireEagle does, straight from the FAQ page:









Fire Eagle is a site that keeps track of your current location and helps you share it with other sites and services safely. There are hundreds of potential applications.












Fire Eagle allows you to share your locations with other sites and services safely, through a secure server – you are always in control. You can decide to share your location with any application that can use it, and even choose how much detail to give that application (exact point, neighborhood, city, state, country).









So, I whipped up a quick Fire Eagle Rubygem to make it easier to deal with Fire Eagle’s API. The next logical step? A twitter bot.






Fire Eagle, meet Danger Day






If you’re lucky enough to have an invite to Fire Eagle, here’s how you can use it on Twitter:







1. Follow Danger Day on Twitter
2. Sign in to Fire Eagle
3. Authorize Danger Day with your FireEagle account
4. Get a mobile token to confirm your authentication with Danger Day
5. Send a direct message to Danger Day with your token.
6. u Atlanta, GA
7. u Belize
8. u 30022
9. u 123 Anytown USA
10. etc
11. d dangerday u Atlanta, GA
12. q jnewland
13. q cjmartin
14. q plasticbagUK
15. d dangerday q jnewland





What’s next?






I’m getting married in a week, so I leave the creation of cooler Fire Eagle apps as an exercise to the reader. Extra bonus points if you use the Fire Eagle Rubygem. If you’ve got a great idea for a Fire Eagle app and don’t have an invite, get in touch with me – I might be able to make that happen.






PS: If you hack up a Fire Eagle javascript sidebar widget that works on pages served as application/xml (preferably using the brilliant wedje technique) AND embraces the draft geo microformat, I’ll buy you a pony. Seriously. Here’s my location in XML – go to town.

Todd Dagres, general partner with Spark Capital, a venture capital firm based in Boston, points out that it will be just as important for Yahoo to not lose its focus on search and try and gain back ground that it has lost to Google (GOOG). Yahoo is also going to have to keep a close eye on Microsoft (MSFT), which is boosting its online ad presence significantly with the purchase of digital ad firm aQuantive.

In social networking, Dagres thinks Yahoo has done a good job attracting users to sites like Yahoo Answers and Flickr. He adds however, that Yahoo must do a better job of integrating all of its sites under the Yahoo umbrella. He describes Yahoo as a “multi-tentacled” organization and that Yang should be prepared to chop off the tentacles that aren’t adding value to the overall company.

Dagres does concede though that Yahoo should bulk up in online video in order to compete more effectively against YouTube. And what do you know? Spark Capital is an investor in upstart online video site Veoh. Hmmm.