Yahoo FireEagle: Geolocation made simple

This service is currently in alpha but thanks to Pranam Kolari I was able to get an invitation to Yahoo!'s FireEagle platform. FireEagle is an easy way to manage and share location information across many applications. Currently, I publish my location information across many different sites and applications and it is rare that I put in the actual effort to update it everywhere. For example I use Dopplr to publish my travel plans, twitter and Brightkite to update my current location and Facebook to indicate my home address and other details. I was impressed with how easy it was (using OAuth) to allow Dopplr and others to share and access information with FireEagle. If you have a GPS enabled phone you can even update the geolocation on the go! Damn! Thats is neat!

One really compelling application is Wikinear.com -- it shows you the nearest places of interest by matching the location information obtained from FireEagle with Wikipedia entries. This is great especially if you are traveling to a new location or a tourist spot and would like to know the places of interest nearby.

Another very cool application is Metosphere. (PS: I wish I had an iPhone!). With this app, you can leave a digital message for a given location, see places and events of interest and even report Graffiti and City Repair! This gives me a reason to believe that the next big thing is going to be mobile advertising. The advantage of easy availability of geolocation information specific to a user is immense. This reminds me of a project at eBiquity research group a few years back, called Agents2go,  that talked about a very similar concept. Imagine that you were walking down the during lunch and the agent on your iPhone would automatically collect coupons or find deals at the nearest restaurants as you walk by. The idea that we can have a query free, geographically relevant search is really exciting. Yahoo! is innovating and pushing hard on the open initiative. With the availability of an API it would be fun to integrate Google Coupons! (OK here is one more fascinating idea and little time at hand!)

Location is a very sensitive piece of information and the best part of FireEagle is that you can manage permissions and privacy settings or even temporarily stop sharing your location. You can allow a specific application to only access location information at a certain granularity: exact, zip, neighborhood, state or even country.  More at Techcrunch.