Paul Walsh, the Irish Opportunist

Fire Eagle, a location enabler for social networks is now available to the public. (Don’t mistaken it, for a social network.)

As an end user, Fire Eagle is a site that stores information about your location. With your permission, it allows other services and devices to update that information or access it. It allows the use of your location to power friend-finders, games, local information services and stuff like that…

As a social network/friend-finder, Fire Eagle enables you to make use of, users’ location - assuming you, or another social network, can capture it on your/their site and store it on Fire Eagle’s. Confused? Just think OpenID and you’ll get it.

For Fire Eagle to be a success, Yahoo! must encourage application developers to adopt it and for developers to make doption for end users seamless. The latter I fear, will not be easy. Like OpenID, a social network must send end users to the Fire Eagle Web site in order to store their location preferences. This is likely to disorientate users as they get shipped off to another brand which has nothing to do with their task in hand. This is the reason OpenID is a great solution for early adopters thus far. Great technical solution. Crap user experience.

I could be wrong of course as I’ve never used it. I’ve only seen a demonstration from Yahoo! It’s the ’shipping off to another brand’s site’ that I dislike, not the technical implementation.