Hacking the Good Days...
A while ago I wrote about the buzz around Fire Eagle, and I’m happy to announce that Steve Marshall is giving a presentation on Fire Eagle, at the Over the Air hack day here at Imperial College.
In nutshell, Fire Eagle is,
Fire Eagle is the secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy, [...] We’re here to make the whole web respond to your location and help you to discover more about the world around you.
An interesting example Steve started with is a Wikipedia-Geo app wikinear.com – which finds Wikipedia pages near you geographically. That’s pretty awesome – the brilliant thing is the results – such as ‘Tokyo Diner’, ‘West End of London’, ‘The Ivy’ etc when you’re in London. Pretty cool, imagine when you’re strolling in new city – you literally become a walking Wikipedia 
One person asked how Fire Eagle knew where you were, and Steve mentioned that some Nokie updaters worked with Fire Eagle, and since it’s completely open, users can actually play around and check out how your phone can sync with Fire Eagle.
*Privacy note: You can purge your data from Fire Eagle anytime, and you can ‘hide’ yourself as well, more information check out readwriteweb’s review.
*For developers: A Yahoo! Group for Fire Eagle Developers (at the time of writing there are 450 members).
*Update: Steve’s blog on Fire Eagle links here.
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I have had the pleasure of attending a number of FireEagle presentations over the last year or so and I can safely say that this was by far the best session I have attended. The crazy thing is that Steve doesnt actually work in the FireEagle team! – Great work Steve, keep up the good work.
I’m having a few authentication problems with the wikinear.com but I am sure this will come out in the wash.
Thanks M I’ll definitely make sure Steve sees your nice feedback – do join the yahoo fire eagle group for trouble-shooting!
See you at our next hack day!