Yahoo FireEagle - A Platform Service For Geo Information
Yahoo isn't just announcing Kickstart this evening. Salim Ismail's Brickhouse is announcing a very useful new platform service tonight tentatively called FireEagle, which is currently in closed alpha testing.
Context & Ripple Effects
FireEagle is the first product out of Yahoo Brickhouse since Salim Ismail was appointed to head the incubator in March 2007, and its framing matters: rather than a consumer site, it is a platform service for geo information — a place where applications can write a user's location and other applications can read it back under that user's control.
The timing underscores how many parallel social bets Yahoo is running at once. On the same evening, Scott Gatz's advanced products group launches Kickstart, a college-and-alumni network pitched as closer to LinkedIn than Facebook, while the company also experiments with Mash. FireEagle is the infrastructure play underneath all of them.
First-order effects
- Third-party developers get a single API through which their applications can update a user's location and query it elsewhere, making FireEagle a shared location store rather than another destination site.
- Users gain granular control over who sees where they are, since every read and write passes through permissions they set on the service itself.
Second-order effects
- Consumer apps — blogs, social networks, mobile tools — no longer need to each build their own location tracking; they can plug into FireEagle, which pressures rivals like Google and smaller players such as Plazes to expose equivalent APIs.
- Any Yahoo property that adopts the service gains location awareness for free, giving Mash and future Brickhouse projects a data layer competitors would have to assemble themselves.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, location stops being a per-app feature and becomes a permissioned platform layer — the open question being whether users will trust one company as the broker of where they are, and whether privacy expectations force standardized consent rules for geo data across the industry.
The trend: Web platforms are turning user data types like location into shared, permission-controlled services, with Yahoo betting that the infrastructure layer attracts developers even when the consumer front-end stays uncertain.