Where r u?

There is an interesting piece on myLoki (Skyhook Wireless) and location information brokering by Brady Forrest on the O’Reilly Radar Blog, about how services are developing to give people more control over how, if and when they share their location with others. Just for fun, I went ahead and signed up for the myLoki account and added the location badge to the homepage of the blog… so if you ever need to know where I… err well where my computer is… chances are the map will give you a good idea of where to start looking… unless of course I stop piggy backing on my neighbors wi fi connection and connect through the corporate network, in which case you’ll likely think I am in Pennsylvania somewhere.

Besides Loki, the author cites a soon to be released developmental project, currently called Fire Eagle, out of the Yahoo idea incubator called Brickhouse as something to watch for in the area of location info brokering.

Details on the Fire Eagle project are scarce, well at least scarce to me, but the best details seem to be directly from Yahoo itself. In the most simple terms, the service allows you to share the location information your collect on yourself, either from a web service or mobile device, with other services and applications that you so choose.

In a way it acts as a clearing house to give control to users who want to share information about their whereabouts with others. It will allow a user to manage the level of location granularity different recipients will be able to see and manage different types of location information, including anything from GPS long/lat data, to Cell ID or manually entered postal code information.

You know how you have to always enter your zip code to do anything from looking at movie listings to seeing what the weather will be tomorrow? Well a system like Fire Eagle at the most basic level could roughly be like having a pervasive cookie that could be read by all sites which could contain your zip code information to share with each site that may request it, eliminating the annoying need for you to re enter that information manually each time you wanted location relevant information.

My guess is that this is the type of baby steps that a solution like Fire Eagle will initially be used for, but the potential is there to do much more powerful things, and could well be an important conduit of such information in the near future which could allow innovative LBS application developers to make a large leap forward.

The general concept of trying to act as this middle man is of course nothing new in these types of online exchanges. I am sure many will recall all the hype around the eWallets that were pervasive in the late 90s. Folks like Microsoft wanted to be your virtual wallet, streamlining and managing the process of giving personal and banking information to the various folks you may want to interact with on the web. In case you didn’t notice, eWallets aren’t pervasive now.

However I wouldn’t be so quick to assume the same fate for services like Fire Eagle for a couple of reasons. First I don’t see people being as paranoid about location as they are about their bank account information, especially given the proper tools for control. Second, the eWallet purely saved you a couple of steps of entering information into an online form manually, so it just saved you some headaches. Sharing location information, however can allow entirely new innovative services to be delivered…. know when friends are nearby, know when a sales is happening nearby, know where your loved ones are, search for anything in your immediate proximity, etc.

Once folks see the value that can be created through location awareness and sharing location awareness they’ll be more likely to gravitate to such a service because of the myriad of benefits they’ll expect to receive in return.