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The Fire Eagle Blog

Follow Fire Eagle on Twitter!November 13

To complete the infinite loop of self-references, Fire Eagle is on Twitter! It's gonna be snappy, chirpy and full of tidbits that would take too long to write a blog post.  In short, follow @fireeagle to get the downlow on Fire Eagle and ask us questions.  Oh and check out Seth's toolkit for assembling XMPP clients.

Where were you when history was made?November 12

Cheesy title, but can you really deny that last week's elections filled you with tingly thrills?  Years later, you will probably be re-telling stories of that historical night and where you were at that moment. Which brings me to the point of this post (no, I'm not going on a political tangent), have you updated your Fire Eagle location lately?

Did you know that there are a multitude of ways to update your Fire Eagle location via websites, widgets, applications, and especially mobile?  Yes, mobile.  Indeed, on the Fire Eagle gallery, a whole section is dedicated to mobile updaters.  The mobile updaters cater mostly to smartphones like the iPhone and Nokia.  Even if you don't have one of those fancy phones, there are still a variety of applications that help update your location like Outside.in Radar, Skout, Brightkite, Loki and

Geode and the future of location-aware browsersOctober 8

Here at Fire Eagle we're working hard to make sharing and using your location really easy. Today we got some help with the release of Mozilla Labs' Geode plugin for Firefox.

Geode is very similar to the Loki Toolbar that we've mentioned before, allowing any website to query your location from Skyhook (the same service used by the iPhone) based on the wireless networks around you. However, Geode differs by implementing the W3C geolocation standard and foreshadowing the inclusion of this technology into Firefox 3.1. This is exciting because it means websites can be location-aware with only a few lines of javascript; in fact the Fire Eagle website already supports Geode!

But wait, isn't that what Fire Eagle is for? Yes, Fire Eagle and Geode are both all about telling websites where you are, but Geode works for websites that you visit while Fire Eagle works for both websites you visit and websites that others visit. We see Geode as another great way for users to update their Fire Eagle location by simply u

Yahoo! Open Hack DaySeptember 3

The second Open Hack Day is upon us: Friday and Saturday, September 12th and 13th at Yahoo!'s Sunnyvale campus.

The Fire Eagle team will be giving an overview / tutorial on Friday from 2-2:50pm to help acquaint hackers with Fire Eagle's capabilities and API.  Also of note, folks from Y! Geo will be presenting on GeoPlanet from 4-4:50pm.  We'll also be hanging out during Hack Day (and night) to help you out where we can.

Space is limited, so sign up soon.  See you there!

Spots, spots, SPOTs everywhereAugust 15

There's lots of talk about mobile updaters like the iPhone or Nokia, but what happens when you're out of cellular range and your phone can't connect to the internet?  I shudder at the thought, but this is not a doomsday post, enter SPOT.

SPOT is a satellite messenger and it's able to update your location from practically anywhere in the world. Unlike other GPS devices, it is able to broadcast your location to friends and family. Oh, and it can save your life. There's a 9-1-1 button which they don't recommend testing, but I've no doubt that it works. SPOT is one of the early Fire Eagle developers and, so far, the only device maker.  They play with satellites, for reals.  So, we were quite excited when SPOT integrated with Fire Eagle. Now, you can link your SPOT with your Fire Eagle account and have it update your Fire Eagle location when you check in or have tracking turned on. If you have the SPOT tracking service, it will periodically check in and update your Fire Eagle location automatically.

SPOT was just as excited as us to see what Fire Eagle users would think of it that they are offering a discounted SPOT with a free year of basic and tracking services to all you early Fire Eagle users. That's going to save you some pennies for sure. Not much more I've got to say, but go try it out for yours