The Fire Eagle plugin for Movable Type connects your Movable Type profile to your account on Yahoo's Fire Eagle service, making your Movable Type install location-aware.

It adds your "Current Location" --pulled periodically from Fire Eagle-- to your profile, makes that location available for other plugins, and provides template tags that allow you to add your current location to your Movable Type-powered blog, including a map of where you're currently at. The plugin also adds Fire Eagle support to the Action Streams plugin, allowing you to share changes to your location in your streams.

What is Fire Eagle?

If you haven't heard about Fire Eagle till now, it's a location brokering service that allows you to manage how your location is shared with friends or applications. Fire Eagle provides a way for you to let applications update your location and let other applications access that information. You can control which applications can update your location and how much detail other applications can see. For example you might use a GPS unit to update your exact location, but only share the particular city you are in with the applications. Fire Eagle is like a switchboard that allows you to easily update, manage, and share your location information with Web services and mobile products.

Twitter killer?

The fact that Fire eagle is a service with an open API and a Social Network might lead people to belive that Fire Eagle is not competition for Twitter and Jaiku. But in fact Fire Eagle is making it possible for others outside of Yahoo to compete with those social networks. Geolocation added to some of the traditional social networking features makes for a powerful combination. While any finished API interface that would allow micro blogging is conspicuously missing it may not be to long before it is added. Once developers find out that it would be easier to ask for this than to try and hack their own from the query reponse.

Security

Security in fire Eagle seems to be doble edged sword. While very granular access permissions are possible there is also a weakness in that the API regarding security is not easy to understand or implement. Involving mobile devices leads to a lot of complication.

Regardles of its shortcomings you will see many more of the open source web content management systems coming out with Fire Eagle solutions.

Happy Publishing!

Perl hack since I was 14. Doing movabletype for fun and pleasure.