New Yahoo service shares users' locations with online services

Fire Eagle is Yahoo's location-aware middleware, which ultimately lets users share their locations with online services, so those sites and applications can deliver results relevant to where they are.

Ten thousand invitation codes were sent out yesterday, in addition to the literal golden tickets given out to those present at Etech in San Diego. Yahoo hopes to entice developers to integrate Fire Eagle into their services to help make location-specific data readily accessible.

Users can set the level of Fire Eagle's awareness -- country, state, city, or geo-coordinate level. When they visit those services, they will be able to receive as specific information as they so choose.

In addition to traffic reporting, locating individuals, and isolating local TV content, Tom Coates of Brickhouse said users will be able to retrieve "exchange rates, local radio, local maps, current weather, nearby photos, timezones, public holidays, local laws...and nearby ICBM missile silos."

And though Coates says Fire Eagle may seem trivial from the user's perspective, he notes there are already 50,000 geo-tagged and categorized locations in Wikipedia alone.

Bruce Sterling is credited with coining the term "Spimes," or objects that are fully trackable in space and time throughout their lifespan. Coates says he loves the idea, and that Fire Eagle has brought spimes' functionality into the real world.