Slashgeo

TechCrunch, Wired, and I'm sure many others are talking about Yahoo's new FireEagle service which is in alpha release now. TechCrunch describes the service,

"FireEagle, which is built entirely on Ruby on Rails, was originally inspired by Yahoo’s ZoneTag research product. It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information."

Wired touches on something I'm sure we'll hear a lot about services that know your location, the "creepy" factor,

"As with most developments in the geo-location realm, FireEagle offers some really cool possibilities —I have no doubt that web developers will leap at the chance to offer seamless integration of geodata — but it also looks a little bit creepy. Do we really want everyone to know exactly where we are all the time? Of course, if you consider that your mobile service provider already has that information, perhaps concern over making it public is a moot point."

I see plenty of "cool possibilities" to having a single warehouse and API for that kind of data, so I'll be trying to get myself in the alpha-testing along with many others I'm sure.

This is a 1-month old news item (still catching up this summer's valuable geonews to share). Introduced late last year, Yahoo's service for geolocation named Fire Eagle is not out of beta. The best coverage I found is on the GEB and APB. Read their entries to learn more. From the APB entry: "I personally think most people don't understand that Fire Eagle alone does nothing. To use it, you need to hook up apps that determine your location (like those on your phone/laptop/etc. - and pay attention to how they use your location data) and then to apps that you want to use your location data (like for finding local restaurants, etc. - and pay attention to how they use your location data). Yahoo sits in between and brokers the information. I think it's a great way to manage location information and privacy as you can turn off or fuzz up data from the collection side before its passed on the use the data side." See also the Yahoo! Internet Location Platform announced last May.

Directions Mag run interview about IDV's SpatialWiki Beta. The introduction: "IDV Solutions announced an open beta of its SpatialWiki recently. SpatialWiki "is an Enterprise 2.0 offering for visual collaboration, deployable within SharePoint or with cloud-based storage. The wiki offers users a number of great benefits including the ability to create custom geospatial shapes on a map, search and view shared geography, and export files." We posed some questions to Chief Technology Officer Ian Clemens." I'm not sure I completely understand the goals behind recent geowikis announcements. See also related stories below.