FireEagle and SMS Grammars
A couple of weeks ago, YRB release Fire Eagle, a platform that is both a secure, generalized way to share location and a reference to Ze Frank’s The Show. I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet, my location reports would be ‘in my apartment, in Brooklyn’ over and over again but I like what YRB is doing. Fire Eagle addresses the fractured way we currently have of telling social software sites where we are located: self reporting, as a byproduct of a third party application such as mobile maps, cell towers, gps, proximity by association, etc. Using the Fire Eagle API, Twitter, Dopplr, Facebook, etc. users, really wherever there is a demand, can report their location through their favorite sites.
Seeing some of these Fire Eagle API implementations reminds me of Dennis’ Ubiquitous Computing for Mobile Devices class where we looked at the dodgeball SMS grammar (e.g. @ace bar) and talked about the best SMS grammars to use for our application. Which keywords would clash with reserved words? Which letters are close to each other and hard to type if you don’t know T9? Right now, when everyone is talking about 3G and GPS everywhere, it’s nice to see people coming back to building SMS grammars, like dangerday for twitter.
d dangerday u Brooklyn,NY
If Fire Eagle takes off (terrible pun not intended) I think it’ll be around for a while. I don’t see any passive, technical solution on the horzion that addresses the fractured location based services market.
Also, I think my friend Marc worked on it. Nice job.
