Good news: Plazes now works with the Fire Eagle! (learn more here)

In case you didn´t  know, Fire Eagle is a location broker recently released by the guys around Tom Coates over at the Yahoo Brickhouse. (Here´s a helpful post on GigaOm). Unfortunately you need an invite to get an account at this time. But you can request one on the Fire Eagle Website.

So what´s the point and isn´t Plazes kind of the same as Fire Eagle, you ask? Well not quite. And depending on how you use it, it can be quite useful to connect the two.

Use the Plazer as an automatic source of location for Fire Eagle

The Plazer Software automatically detects your location based on fingerprinting your local network. So once you´ve got the Plazer on your laptop or work computer you can turn autostart and auto-plazing on and Plazes will know that you are at home, at work or at Heathrow Airport (Unfortunately Plazer can´t tell you where your luggage is). Now, all you need to do is authenticate the Fire Eagle for your Plazes account and there you go. Fire Eagle now retrieves the address of your current Plaze and sets it as your location.

Use Plazes SMS to update your location from any mobile

Don´t have a phone with GPS? Do not worry. Once you have connected Plazes to the Fire Eagle you can easily update your location simply by sending an SMS to Plazes. Of course you can also use any other extension that you use to plaze yourself to update your location on Fire Eagle. Use the Plazes Facebook app, Peter´s iPlazer or the Presence Router. Really, whatever is most convenient for you.

Connect your Plazes account to all Services supporting Fire Eagle

Once you´ve got your location set from Plazes, Fire Eagle will, depending on your privacy settings, pipe it through to other services. For example you can update your current city on Dopplr based on your current Plaze. And in the future once more services retrieve your location form Fire Eagle you can synchronise a whole bunch of services auto-magically with Plazes.

Let´s hope that the guys over at Fire Eagle start supporting Plaze ID soon so that you can not only be at an address or lat/lon but actually at a meaningful Plaze.

Right now, Plazes only pushes your location to Fire Eagle. The other way around is a little tricky because we have to match your lat/lon with a Plaze. We are working on it… So if you have any suggestions where we should take things, go ahead and comment. Have fun for now!

Start here (Login required)

Update: In order for Fire Eagle to see your presence it needs to be public on Plazes. You can still leave your default privacy on Plazes on a tighter settting like “friends only” but the individual Plazings that you wish to publish will need to be public. One idea for the future might be that you add Fire Eagle as a friend on Plazes. Feel free to comment.

Update: The great guys at Fire Eagle gave us invites. So drop us a mail with your Plazes username and well see to it.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.