Yahoo!’s FireEagle application went into private beta today. The system has APIs for developers to tap into and there are claims that there a numerous developers working with it. What it enables is third-party location awareness of users, whether on the desktop or in mobile.
The bottom line is: if Yahoo! can get lots of people to adopt and use the system then developers will want to work with it. It potentially can provide better location awareness for publishers, verticals, advertisers and mobile applications, which means better content and more locally targeted ads. One scenario: Yahoo! could simply take all its registered users (more than 200 million) and ask them to opt-in to the system. Then you’d have a pretty massive group to tap into. But otherwise it’s a long climb potentially.
Location is updated manually by users: today I’m in San Francisco, tomorrow I’m in New York. All of the participating third parties would then get the benefit of that location awareness (on the desktop or in mobile). Location will eventually be capable of being changed in mobile as well. Each time you change location in FireEagle, everyone working with the system, whose sites you visit, will know about it. (FireEagle is Beacon-like but more transparent.) It’s like OpenID for location in a way.
This is one of range of strategies to get a fix on user location: GPS, cell-tower triangulation, WiFi triangulation, user registration data, default location settings, etc.
March 6, 2008 at 3:41 pm |
[...] up with these names?), as Greg put it in FireEagle Success Depends on Scale, is like an OpenID for Location. I like that turn of phrase and think it’s in the right [...]