Via the magic of Twitter, Twhirl and @dangerday, I’ve finally found myself in possession of a Fire Eagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/) invite. Clicking through the link that was e-mailed to me, I logged in with my Yahoo ID and there I was – finally – in Fire Eagle. In case you’re not familiar with FE, here’s their brief description:

Fire Eagle is a service that helps users share their location online with their friends and with other sites and services. Find out more about the service by exploring below...

I.e. “twitter for location”, sorta.

he site itself is visually appealing, with large buttons and fairly obvious styled using YUI (http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/). And there’s a pretty background, in pseudo-Miami Vice colors.

You get to select how often they’ll check back with you to make sure I’m comfortable with sharing my location. A strange thing I’ll have to admit: if I stop sharing my location with FE, then I’m probably no longer interested in have you know where I am (or it’s Game Over man and I’m not worried about it). From other reviews I read I thought there was a way to fuzzy my location – i.e. just show what neighborhood, city, province or even country I’m in – but I can’t seem to find that option.

The first thing I tried in FE is “update your location”. Just for a laugh I entered “home”, but alas FE unsportingly offered a list of places called “Home” (and 奉免) no doubt populated by some very boring people. More seriously, it would be nice if I could enter “home”, “glenn’s office”, “doug’s house”, etc. as that more corresponds to my idea of location and is way more semantic. Perhaps this feature is coming.

Next I entered my (Canadian) postal code and bingo, there I am: a pin in a map. Then I entered “YYZ” to see if FE understands airports and yes it does. Then I tried to go back home, only to discover that it doesn’t seem to track previous locations. The INPUT field does respond to the down arrow, but it still shows “home” where I never was apparently and when I do select something, it doesn’t fill in the field. Sigh. Well, I know what it’s like to be in Beta (http://www.onaswarm.com).

Then I gave the “Application Gallery” a try. Alas, three applications (Fire Eagle Badge , Fire Eagle on Facebook and SMS Updates! [sic]) are listed, but none of them are there yet.

So where FE stands right now is it's a developer platform. If you're not a developer I wouldn't rush out of my way to get an invite. I’m going to play with this over the next few days and see how that works out. Here’s some brief notes:

• there doesn’t appear to be any option for providing a non-protected update stream. Really, I don’t mind providing this information, if I can fuzzy it up
• results are available in a custom XML format (boo) and in JSON. Why not GeoRSS or Atom?
• authentication is done using OAuth (http://oauth.net/). Is Yahoo all OAuth now? Something to check out. Probably not
• there’s an excellent selection API kits: Javascript, PHP, Perl, Python and Ruby. No Java? Well it’s official: Java is the new COBOL – you’re on your own!
• there’s an API for updating location so it seems that you, for example, have a Twitter client that updates your location on FE. Or something that looks at your Calendar or TripIt agenda (http://www.tripit.com) and makes the appropriate updates.

Missed posting yesterday -- sorry, it was a travel day. I'm on vacation right now, but a working one.

Hi There. I've added a map to this post.

Brady at O'Reilly Radar writes:

GeoPress is a plugin that makes it easy to embed locations and maps in a WordPress blog - without having to code! It was previewed last week at FOSS4G and v1.0 was released today at EuroOSCON in Brussels.

As evidenced by the remarkable adoption of geocoding in Flickr (over 4 million photos have been geo-tagged in just over 3 weeks) people want to add this data to their content. GeoPress enables that for a WordPress blog. It allows the user to easily add maps and geo-coded locations to their posts. Blog posts can also be organized by location. Embedded locations and addresses are inserted as microformats and are syndicated out in GeoRSS 1.0 (which was finalized and released last week at FOSS4G).

Yeah, yeah -- we've been showing this for half a year :-)

I was at the University of Toronto this morning, courtesy of Greg Wilson to run through in more detail the demo I gave at DemoCamp several months back (link, link). In return I got a demo of BlogScope which is tracking an impressive 2.6 million blogs as of today. BlogScope does "text stream" analysis of blog posts, tracking what's popular, what's hot ("bursts"), and doing a form a faceted analysis ("correlation") -- what other words are popular in posts that have a certain word/phrase in them -- which is cleverly done since one would expect this to be a O(N²) algorithm.

We discussed structured data, geotags, tagging (all pretty key concepts in BlogMatrix) and so forth and how they could be used to extend BlogScope. There's a lot of potential for this application in "intranets", closed networks, if RSS/Atom had widespread adoption to export events and data with an organization.

An interesting story in the New York Times today about how Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are all building giant data centers in Washington state to take advantage of cheap power, and to a lesser degree, proximity to customers:

Even before the Oregon center comes online, Google has lashed together a global network of computers — known in the industry as the Googleplex — that is a singular achievement. "Google has constructed the biggest computer in the world, and it's a hidden asset," said Danny Hillis, a supercomputing pioneer and a founder of Applied Minds, a technology consulting firm, referring to the Googleplex.

The design and even the nature of the Google center in this industrial and agricultural outpost 80 miles east of Portland has been a closely guarded corporate secret. "Companies are historically sensitive about where their operational infrastructure is," acknowledged Urs Holzle, Google's senior vice president for operations.

Behind the curtain of secrecy, the two buildings here — and a third that Google has a permit to build — will probably house tens of thousands of inexpensive processors and disks, held together with Velcro tape in a Google practice that makes for easy swapping of components. The cooling plants are essential because of the searing heat produced by so much computing power.

The complex will tap into the region's large surplus of fiber optic networking, a legacy of the dot-com boom.

If it's cheap power you're looking for, I have just the place for you -- Labrador. Consider the benefits:

• the Lower Churchill Falls project (yet to be built) is expected to generate 4,000 MV
• Churchill Falls is cool to cold, reaching an average daily maximum of 18 degrees in July and in fact, for much of the year, the daily average temperature is below 0
• It's less than 1500 km to NYC, the New England States and central Canada
• labour is available
• the government would be willing to make consessions

Issues uncovered while making this post:

• it would be nice to be able to dynamically update your Google Key OR at least post a message but not display it.
  
• the map extension is flaking out in "show" if there is no key
• it would be nice to be able to place multiple markers on the map AND to reference those markers from within the message body
• we need a cool way to add a degrees symbol (and other special characters)