Fireball is a mashup using Fire Eagle, Twitter and Upcoming and was all the rage at the Web2.0 Expo in San Francisco a few days ago.

The main purpose of the Fire Eagle Developer Evening was to get to know developers in the UK that can benefit from Fire Eagle and make it easier for them to take their first steps.

We reported about Fire Eagle before, but to re-iterate in a nutshell:

• A lot of applications allow you to tell the world where you are physically located either using GPS devices, or by entering the information by hand.
• Other services and applications are consuming this information and do something with it (in the simplest case showing you a map centered around your location).
• Fire Eagle sits in between all of these applications and makes it easy to set your location (and if needed disambiguate it) and retrieve this information in easy to digest formats for consuming services.

Using Fire Eagle as a central point of storing and retrieving your location it becomes easy for a lot of services to improve the quality of their results - information and services becomes literally easy to reach as they are in your area.

During the evening Seth and Steve showed examples in Ruby and Python how to access the different API methods and set up your first small application using Fire Eagle.

One of the main concerns of the team is security and protection of private data. This is why Tom walked the audience through the benefits of the OAuth authentication standard and its implementation in Fire Eagle. Another point he made very clear is that creating a location-based application is quite a responsibility and that any developer for Fire Eagle should abide to their code of conduct.

All in all it was a great evening of beers, pizza, lots and lots of laptops and code and hopefully we'll see a lot of great applications using Fire Eagle coming out of it.

I've uploaded a bunch of photos of the event and the shenanigans beforehand to flickr so see what you missed there.

If you want to play with Fire Eagle and need an invite code, leave a comment with a valid email and we will send you one - there are some left over from the event (around 20).

This was one of many developer evenings to come in Europe. We set up a mailing list for European YDN events in case you want to take part in the future and hear about them first-hand.

Christian Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network