It's Danger Day, Fire Eagle Flies

Today we let loose the developer’s launch of fire eagle a location broker platform from yahoo brickhouse. It’s what i’ve been working on for the last 6 months and is the first publicly facing rails app to launch at Yahoo!

I’m really excited by Fire Eagle. It’s a system which lets you collect your location from any number of sources, such as your cellphone, and then provide that back out to other applications. Fire Eagle then lets you fuzz your location and control who is using it. Share the city you’re in with dopplr, the neighborhood with facebook, but let the taxi locator see your exact location.

I’m proud of the work i’ve done fire eagle and to have worked with a great team, including Tom, Seth, Jeannie, Skylar, Schuyler, Ayman, Kevin, Marc, Phil, Salim, Mor, and Sam.

We’ve got an irc channel, #fireeagle on irc.freenode.net, wiki, twitter bot, and mailinglist. Come join us and play.

Launching a ruby on rails app at yahoo has been an incredible experience. We’ve had to figure out how to marry a stable mature platform with the agile, test driven, DRY model of development which Rails has popularized. I’m particularly excited that we were able to adopt oauth and open standards like georss and geojson.