April 22, 2008

Fireball - Location-based event microblogging using Twitter, Upcoming and Fire Eagle

Just in time for the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, a team of developers - Leonard Lin, Steve Marshall, and Kellan Elliott-McCrea - have released Fireball, a location-sharing mashup built on Fire Eagle, Twitter, and Upcoming.

It doesn't require you to join and populate "yet another" social network app, since it builds on existing services, using Twitter as an interface and to bring your social graph to bear, Fire Eagle for secure sharing of your location, and Upcoming for cross-correlating events and locations.

Says Kellan, a Flickr application engineer "building technology solutions for social problems":

What I love about Fire Eagle is that we aren't asking people to change their behavior (much), just helping people make sense of the information deluge. Answering the eternal "It's 3am, do you know where your friends are?" questions. I think it's pretty amazing that we have the "small pieces loosely joined" to build a tool like Fireball, that lives in existing tools, and uses APIs, and Jabber to tie it all together.

Fireball developer Leonard Lin agrees:

We didn't want to write a brand new "app," per se. We wanted to add some features onto things you already use. I just want Twitter with location. It doesn't make sense to have to rewrite Twitter to get one new feature.

Christian Crumlish
Yahoo Developer Network

Posted at April 22, 2008 4:45 PM

Comments

Posted by: Dave Delaney at April 23, 2008 8:37 PM