Thanks to LordElph, I got an invite to Yahoo’s newest thing, Fire Eagle. I feel as though there’s enough fire stuff in the world with Firefox and its eternal enemy, Firedog. But oh well.

Fire Eagle is a centralized location information service, basically. You can use its built-in APIs to set user location information and grab user information from it (assuming you have the correct permissions).

This is cool because in the past, applications have had to do this location stuff on their own. For example, if I wanted to set up a Twitter clone that knew a user’s location, I’d have to be able to take the information and process it, and retrieve it later. Fire Eagle handles a lot of stuff like figuring out exactly where a user when things might be ambiguous (I typed in “University of Michigan” and it gave me a choice between the main campus and the Dearborn one).

I’m planning on coding up some location aware applications at some point soon, so I think it’ll be fun to try and see what I can do with the help of this Fire Eagle thing. Yahoo has definitely done something unique and I give them some props for working on this service!