The Problem With FireEagle
At d.Construct 2007 Tom Coates was the last presenter of the day and during his session talked a little about FireEagle, the new location tracking service from Yahoo. I remember thinking that what he was talking about sounded seriously cool with lots of potential, so when they recently opened up the private beta I knew I wanted to be part of it.
For those of you not familiar with FireEagle I’ll try my best to describe it for you. It is essentially an information service. It is not a social network or the next big Web 2.0 app. The information it deals with is your location. You can tell FireEagle (either directly or by a service built on top of FE) your location and FE can report your location back to services or applications you have given permission (via OAuth) to. You can also fine grade the fidelity at which your location is reported on an app by app basis; from your exact location through neighbourhood, region, right up to the country you are currently in. Another interesting aspect, it is entirely possible to lie to FireEagle, you can be wherever you want to be.
On it’s own FireEagle may be inherently cool but it’s pretty useless. It requires services and apps to be built on top of it to make use of the data it provides. So, it’s late on Sunday night and a storm is brewing outside. I sat down to think about if I could make something cool with FireEagle. It may have been because it was very late or that the sound of impending doom was quite distracting but I was stumped. But why. What is the problem with FireEagle.
I started by thinking about some of the location aware services that Tom Coates has alluded to:
Well, the way you’d do a service like that is that you’d use the service to work out just *your* location, and then you’d use that location to do a search on geo-coded plumbers. You would never have to share your location with other users. It would be just like typing in your location into Yelp or something.
Having said all of that, finding plumbers probably wouldn’t be totally useful. But having your mobile device displaying nearby restaurants, bars, cafés, points of interest, transit solutions, photographs or local services generally - now that might be useful!
The key phrase in there is “It would just be like typing in your location into Yelp or something.” Thus we discover the first problem with FireEagle. If a user browses to a location aware service, why don’t they just type in where they are. Why would they want to sign in, redirect to FireEagle, authorise the app, tell FireEagle where they are, redirect back to the app and then find out where the nearest pizzeria is. Add to that, that they may have to register with the app and FireEagle if they haven’t used them before.
It’s a contrived example I know but essentially the user chooses to enter their location directly or to FireEagle and then they get the results. The second problem steps forth. In it’s current form FireEagle requires the user to know where they are. I say in it’s current form because there are plans to develop auto discover services on top of FireEagle. Alas as far as I can tell there is no way for third party iPhone Apps to access the “Locate Me” location from Google Maps UPDATE: Turns out there is. If FE becomes able to automatically discover where you are and update on the fly then maybe there will be some merit to location aware services similar to those described by Tom. We will see.
After that I started thinking about cool stuff you could build with it right now. I thought about YASN where you and all your friends can join up and using FireEagle it can tell you where they all are and if anyone you know is nearby. That sounds pretty cool. Except Dopplr already does this, does a damn good job and, as of very recently, integrates with FE. It will be interesting to see if Dopplr with FE provides any extra functionality or a better experience than Dopplr sans FE.
I get that FireEagle is cool. Why can’t I think of anything cool to do with it. I thought about incidental stuff you could do with location. For example visiting a news site could show you local stories and weather, location aware Google searches, Flickr showing pictures recently taken near by you and similar. Okay this sounds more like it. Accept your location is not ethereally available to any site you visit. For sites to access your location data they must be authorised via OAuth. I’m not saying this is a bad thing, this is absolutely the right way to do it, however it may limit FE’s usefulness in this regard to sites you visit often; those that make it worth doing the OAuth and managing access permissions for the authorised sites.
The final idea I rolled around in my brain was the obvious one for which widgets are already in development; announcing your previous location on your blog, Facebook, MySpace etc. I guess that is kinda cool but the novelty will quickly wear off and it will become yet another piece of metadata. That’s not a bad thing but it dosn’t generate the kind of buzz I felt when I first heard Tom speak about FireEagle.
In my ideal world every internet capable device would have a GPS chip and report it’s latitude and longitude in it’s HTTP headers along with IP address, browser version et al. Obviously the user would be in control of which sites could use this data on a site by sites basis. In the meantime FireEagle is a good solution. I hope there are smarter people than out there than me that can come up with something truly stunning to inspire us all.