FireEagle and geo-location fun
FireEagle is a newer service from Yahoo, it's an API and service that stores your geo-location and lets other application read or update it. With your permission, of course.
Now there's a FireEagle Firefox extension, still marked experimental in Add-ons.Mozilla.org so you need a free AMO account in order to download it.
Once you install it, it will lead you through installing a prerequisite - the Geode extension from Mozilla Labs which checks the WiFi networks that are available to you and figures out where you are. The FireEagle extension then uses Geode to get the location and update its database. Of course you have full control over how precisely you want to share your location (exact, zip, neighborhood, city, state, country).
So what then? Well, then there's the FireEagle api and a bunch of applications using it to do all kinds of stuff, like update you Facebook profile and so on. Also the extension is just one way to figure out your location, there are also other ways like iPhone apps.
Geo-location via JavaScript
What I found fascinating is that once you have Geode, pages can request your location via JavaScript. This is actually a w3c standard.
A simple example of logging the position object - just type into Firebug's console:
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(console.log)
A warning appears that the page has requested you location and you can say No! or you can allow a degree of access - exact, neighborhood or city.
Once you allow access, an async process kicks in and your callback (in this case console.log) gets notified when the location information is available. The callback receives a "position" object which has properties such as latitude, longitude, velocity, accuracy...
Pretty neat stuff.
This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 and is filed under JavaScript, yahoo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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March 12th, 2009 at 6:17 am
Nice but Geode doesn’t work on Linux… even if the link to grab the plugin says “Firefox Add-on for Windows, Mac or Linux”.
March 13th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Nice. This will bring much better accuracy in comparison to IP geocoding, but having to install a browser extension definitely hurts. Until this type of service comes built-in to web browsers it won’t be of much use.
March 13th, 2010 at 7:24 pm
That’s nice, I will give it a try.
However I am not able to use Geode on Linux, confirming my idea that the biggest problem for Fireeagle right now is the scarcity of good location updaters.
A solution I implemented on my website is to use Navimote, a small application that runs on most mobile phones and locates you via Wifi + cell towers. It works pretty well. It runs in the background and sleeps until you call it (via push technology).
When users visit http://www.shhpot.com, Navimote is triggered, replies with the position, and Shhpot! updates the user’s position on Fireeagle while providing the “best webpage” for that specific location.
It’s still experimental, but if you want to give it a try, you’re extremely welcome!
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