Yahoo Fire Eagle launches

Plans to help you control Your web

13 August 2008 11:30 GMT / By Stuart Miles

Yahoo, fresh from its battle with Microsoft, has launched Fire Eagle out of private beta.

Fire Eagle is an open platform that promises to help users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.

According to Yahoo, because it's open, any networked service can use Fire Eagle to respond to a user's location - to help them find their friends, annotate the world or find nearby services or local information.

For users, say Yahoo Fire Eagle acts as an interface for managing location information and deciding how - and with whom - to share it.

Users can authorise Web, mobile or desktop applications to update their location automatically, or they can do it themselves manually on the Fire Eagle Web or mobile sites.

Then they can decide how much of that information to share with their favourite services. At any time they can hide themselves, change their sharing preferences or delete any of their stored information.

Partners already working with the new platform include Dash, Dopplr, Loki and Movable Type.

Dash is a two-way, Internet-connected GPS navigation system offering an innovative solution to traffic monitoring while Dopplr is a service for intelligent travelers that helps them make the most of their trips by sharing their travel plans with the people they trust.

Loki adds your location into your favourite social networks so you can share it with your friends such as Facebook, Twitter, Fire Eagle, RSS Feeds and more.