Okay, I just joined Fire Eagle from Yahoo because I liked the name and it seemed interesting. But, frankly, I have no idea why it’s a useful tool.
In case you’re unfamiliar with Fire Eagle it’s a service that tells people where you are at anytime. FE supplies data to numerous applications and appears to receive the data from other apps as well. One interlink app looks cool and a little creepy – it syncs your location from a car GPS system. So, like, when I’m cruising down highway I-?? in Iowa all my peeps in London will know. Or, like, you know the CIA.
But the creepiness factor aside, I can’t think many real world applications:
- Business – This service with the GPS coordinate thing would be helpful if HQ wants to monitor its sales people and their location or if there’s an experience marketing van (the Oscar Myer Wiener Mobile for instance) and one wants to report about it, or get the closest person to visit a client
- Personal – It appears helpful if I was traveling and needed to keep my family in formed (now entering Iran Dad, if you don’t hear from me in 24 hrs …) or something similar. Of course a text message could do the same thing.
Maybe it’s because this type of stuff normally doesn’t interest me because me telling the world where I’m located isn’t something I would be interested in doing (because it isn’t something I would follow) or reading. Most people who know me know that I don’t understand why people read other people’s personal blogs if they don’t know them or the author isn’t famous.
So here’s my question: I normally understand things through examples … the for instance stuff … so why would you, oh dear reader … use Fire Eagle?
FireEagle’s a platform, you need to get add ons to make it work for you. Say for example your a photographer who travels you take pics and when you upload to flickr your pics are geotagged by an add on like zonetag. Plazes will help you share information about… well… places. Say I’m traveling to… oh I don’t know… Switzerland and I have amazing sushi, and a couple of months later you go to Switzerland and are looking for a place to eat Plazes will allow you to see geotagged places that your friends have rated. The success of FE depends on the apps being built.
Hey there. You don’t actually need to use Fire Eagle to share your location with any other people! You could just use it so that a local search thing on your phone always defaulted to where you were, or to show you nearby bars or Flickr photos or tell you the exchange rate for the country you’re in, or to geotag your blog posts. All kinds of stuff really. And – again – if you did want your friends to know ROUGHLY where you were, you could only share your neighbourhood.