Location.
This is something that is important in real estate. Online real estate is becoming more mobile and location is becoming more important. There are a number of location based startups that have been springing onto the scene. Fire Eagle, a Yahoo location based social networking platform, launched into beta today to store your current physical location in the world and syncs it with other applications. For example, Dopplr, Brightkite and even the new Dash Express can share information with Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle acts as the go-between, storing your location, and sharing it with apps according to rules you set up. This may be the first location aggregator for all of your location-based social applications.
Currently, there are handful of applications that Fire Eagle is
synchronized with but I expect that list to grow with time as mobile
and location-base application continue to pop up. While I understand
the importance of location for context around finding friends, food or
other location-based information it is not clear to me what Yahoo plans
to do with Fire Eagle other than play a game similar to that of
"telephone" for other location-based apps while recording your every
move. I guess there probably is a lot of value in knowing where you are
at all times but a part of me gets creeped out by people knowing where
I am at all times. Maybe I am a little paranoid of big brother or maybe
I have watched too many CSI episodes but either way I think
location-based applications strut on the fine line of invasions of
privacy. But then again, it was not long ago that sharing "what you are
doing" ala Twitter seemed a little bit much.
Do you feel location-based applications like Fire Eagle are an invasion of your privacy?
