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.