SUNNYVALE, USA: Yahoo! Inc. on Tuesday announced the launch of Fire Eagle (http://fireeagle.yahoo.net), a new service designed to make it safe and easy to build and use location-aware applications and services.
The open platform helps users take their location to the web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared, said a press release.
It gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers clear protocol for updating or accessing that information.
According to the company, any network service can use Fire Eagle to respond to a user's location - to help them find their friends, annotate the world or find nearby services or local information.
“Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location," said Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo! Brickhouse.
"We're here to help people take their location to the Web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with."
It is much easier for both users and developers to create Internet experiences that are geo-aware as it acts as a simple interface for managing location information and deciding how-and with whom-to share it, the release added.