With Yahoo making Fire Eagle’s launch (of beta version) in March 2008; it is now open to public with 22 launch partners providing their services. Fire Eagle allows developers to build services tailored to the user’s geographic area, using its location-based middleware.
The process for enabling location-based service is such that it begins by asking the user for their location (country or even global coordinates), thereby completing Fire Eagle’s job – from there onwards, the applications built upon the service take command.
The applications range from a variety of devices and OS, though most are not cross-platform. The gallery of applications currently includes:
Social networking apps from Brightkite, Plazes, Loki and Zkout – which are all location-based apps.
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· Travel mapping apps from Dopplr, May My Tracks, eKit and Navizon
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· Point-of-interest and event listings from Lightpole, Outalot and Wikinear
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· Location-based search from Rummble
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· Messaging from Spot and Pownce, and
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· News from Outside
An internet-connected GPS (personal navigation) app is up for grabs from Dash, Fire Eagle widgets for the OSX dashboard, J2ME mobile location updater (for Nokia N95 w/GPS), iPhone geotagging from Metosphere, a Movable Type blog plug-in, and a Fllickr geotagging mashup for Nokia & Motorola phones known as Zonetag.
The Fire Eagle API is accessable through Yahoo’s Developer Center for developers wishing to grab this geo-aware infrastructure. Applications available are categorized in three types: Web, mobile and desktop – where each provides a different authentication type. So developers have to have a general idea of what they’re building before they can obtain an API key. Whereas, Yahoo provides some walkthroughs & examples for the developer’s assistance as well.
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