Where are you? Fire Eagle

Everyone and everything want to know where you are these days. Why? for everyone's benefit, including your own, hopefully. But would you like everyone and everything to know where you are?

Today I came across Yahoo's Fire Eagle. It's basically a location service. You tell the eagle where you are. And you don;t have to tell the fox or the cat where you are. They can ask the eagle where you are. But the eagle is trustworthy. It only tells others your location if you allow it to do so. So you can tell the eagle "Allow the fox to know my exact location" and/or "Allow the cat to know my approximate location". And then the fox asks the eagle for your location, and the fox can offer you better search results, and better targeted ads too!

So how do you tell the eagle where you are? First of all you need a yahoo account. (The eagle will never give out your yahoo account name or details to anyone; it talks with cats and foxes using cryptic keys. It's actually very secure and conforms to OAuth).

And then you can simply type in your address/location on the eagle's website pinpoint form, as often as you like. But you would not want to keep updating that all the time wouldn't you? So there are applications that do that for you, like one that you can download on a GPS enabled phone, that will keep the eagle updated automatically with your location.

So now, I, Mr. Nobody Developer can create a web application and if you, Mr. User, trust me, you can tell the eagle to let me know your location. Here's how it works:

1. I simply send you to the eagle with a request to let me see your location
2. You confirm with the eagle that you want to let me see your location
3. The eagle sends you back to me with an authorisation
   
4. I ask the eagle where you are, using that authorization you brought with you
5. The eagle tells me where you are (after triple checking that I am allowed to know!)

Pretty simple isn't it? And I can store that authorisation so that I can try using it straight away next time you visit me (or whenever I just feel like knowing where you are). As long as that authorisation is still valid (i.e. you haven't told the eagle otherwise), the eagle will tell me your location.

It took me a couple of hours to get my head around the concept. I hope it took you much shorter by reading this post.