After a while in private beta, Yahoo’s Brickhouse development group has set loose public beta of Fire Eagle, a new service that aims to be a centralized hub for users to tap into location-aware Internet applications. The idea is that users update their location info via Fire Eagle—ideally via a mobile phone, but using the Web works too—and a myriad of location aware services will all be able to pick up that information and work their location-specific magic for that users—like alerting you to nearby friends, a great restaurant nearby, updating traffic information, getting directions…and, no doubt one day, being subjected to location-specific ads.
