Some news on a cool app that isn’t getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people’s location information. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works:
“When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a tiny URL link. When you click on the link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell phone and shows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration with Upcoming.org.”
FireBall is definitely looking like a smart and hip mashup of popular and useful services. For now, it’s in private testing and only works in
Also, while Twitter and Upcoming need no introduction, Yahoo’s Fire Eagle platform merits a paragraph as a standalone service. Originally described as “twitter for location”, Fire Eagle had its private beta launch earlier this month, allowing a select group of users to stream their location information to each other. But, as Michael Arrington at TechCrunch explains, it’s much more than that:
“FireEagle has (well, will have) open APIs to send data and get data out. That will make a variety of other web services much more useful, since they’ll be able to figure out where you are without asking. Flickr images, for example, can be auto-tagged with location by comparing the time the photo was taken to your location at that time in FireEagle.”
Other sample features include a MySpace “I was pinpointed” badge that shows off your location, a Facebook app that displays a map with your friends pinpointed, and SMS update functionality on-the-go. The Fire Eagle team has announced that there are at least 50 third-party sites that have developed apps with the locator’s API, letting us imagine a social media suite that instantly updates based on location, adding tailored local search and news results. We can’t wait.
[...] Original post by Searchviews – Daily insights on Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO by Reprise Media. [...]
[...] Searchviews – Daily insights on Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO by Reprise Media. wrote an interesting post today on FireBall: Twitter Your Location, MobileHere’s a quick excerpt Some news on a cool app that isn’t getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people’s location information. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works: “When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a tiny URL link. When you click [...]
[...] Searchviews – Daily insights on Search Marketing, Social Media and SEO by Reprise Media. wrote an interesting post today on FireBall: Twitter Your Location, MobileHere’s a quick excerpt Some news on a cool app that isn’t getting much coverage yet. FireBall is a mobile geo-location service that integrates Twitter and Upcoming with Fire Eagle, a Yahoo!-run platform for controlling people’s location information. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld with a quick bit on how it works: “When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed up for FireBall, you send a message to a FireBall account on Twitter. You get back a text message with a tiny URL link. When you click [...]