March 13, 2009

State of the Eagle

Both South by Southwest and my lease are coming up this weekend, which means that Fire Eagle is a year old. Last March, we started sending out invitations to the Fire Eagle Beta. Since then, we’ve worked hard to build out an equal access platform, with both libraries and APIs, focusing on getting data and information to external developers and determining the best ways to preserve users’ privacy.

In the meantime, Mozilla Labs released Geode, more and more startups are incorporating location as a way to improve their users’ experience, Google launched Latitude, and I have a copy of Wired Magazine’s “Inside the GPS Revolution” on my desk. User location is finally hitting the big-time and is clearly here to stay.

If you hadn’t already realized this, you should be incorporating user location into your applications. Fire Eagle is how. Incorporating Fire Eagle into your sites allows you to tap into your users’ locations while benefiting from the ecosystem of other developers doing the same thing.

We hit the pavement hard last year, both to test out Fire Eagle’s location awareness and to spread the word. We launched at ETech, gave out t-shirts at SXSW, presented our vision for pervasive user location at Where 2.0, Webstock, and Web 2.0 Expo, discussed privacy at WhereCamp and the Social Computing Summit, and pondered ways to provide real-time access at XTech and OSCON.

With the help of the open-source community, we’ve developed Fire Eagle libraries for:

• PHP
• Ruby
• Java
• C++
• ActionScript 3
• JavaScript
• Python
• C# (as well as here and here)
• Perl

Once the iPhone SDK was released, we started seeing Fire Eagle updaters in the App Store:

• Sparrow
• Voilà!
• yofe!
• Fire Fone

If you look hard enough, you might even find the unfinished one that Mike from Pownce built and released into the public domain.

We built a WordPress plugin to complement Six Apart’s MovableType support and watched as the developer of the Java library built an updater for Android phones.

Last month, we released the result of our OAuth+XMPP experiments as low-latency Location Streams, complete with Java Ruby, and C# support. We had our OAuth implementation referred to as the “gold standard”, providing “users and developers real added value that can only be done using OAuth.” *blush*

This weekend, we’re back at South by Southwest with more t-shirts and a couple new tricks.

First, we’ve built the Fire Eagle Updater Add-on for Firefox. It provides a simple, easily accessible way to update your location from your browser whenever you want.

We’ve also put together a little something we’re calling “Friends on Fire”. It’s a Facebook app that allows you to share your location with your friends and send them signals about what you’re up to (or what you’d rather be doing). We initially wanted to present it as an example of what you can do with Fire Eagle (because it is), but we think it’s impressive enough to stand on its own as a valuable addition to your Facebook experience. Tell your friends!

All and all, it’s been a great year for user location on the web and we look forward to seeing what 2009 brings. We look forward to hearing from you!

• Read the docs
• Join the mailing list

Seth Fitzsimmons
Fire Eagle Tech Lead

Posted at March 13, 2009 6:00 AM | Permalink

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Comments

Posted by: mkpaa at March 14, 2009 2:24 AM