Fire Eagle is in beta
I’ve written about Fire Eagle before and it’s no secret that I had high hopes for the projects. A few hours ago the nice people at Yahoo sent me a beta invite, and greedily read through the developer docs to see what goodies awaited… The result, sadly, is that there aren’t many goodies at the moment.
Most importly, Fire Eagle doesn’t come with any applications yet, so it’s really hard to test the actual UI. I typed in my current location and it registered it. That’s it. Disappointing.
On the API front Fire Eagle doesn’t push too many boundaries either: You can set a user’s location, and you can get the user’s location. As has been reported before, Fire Eagle handles privacy in two ways. First, you need to verify an application’s access level (just as when you use the Flickr or 23 API), and depending on that level of access locations are returned more or less precisely. If, for instance, you only want a Facebook app to know your current city rather than the exact coords, Fire Eagle allows for that. Which is cool. It’s nice that you can upload coords from a GPS tracking thingy and still retain some intimacy.
I won’t make a point-by-point comparison of Fire Eagle to the Plazes API — but they are really similar in scope and ambition. The only difference is that Fire Eagle will see support in fifty apps by April 1st. Plazes won’t. Also, Fire Eagle is not trying to be a social network as well as a backend interface. It’s only the glue between locator apps and location apps.
As I probably mentioned in my previous post I have great hopes for Fire Eagle, but I’m largely underwhelmed by the beta. Hopefully, nice people on the interweb will prove me right in the upcoming weeks?
Update: Nice! While I was bitching about not being able to use Fire Eagle for something useful, Dopplr released support for the Eagle.