I love it when you run into friends on the street. You don’t have to make plans. You don’t have to get organized. You just get to catch up with each other and chat. And it’s even better when running into someone on the street turns into an excuse for a coffee, or a drink, or a meal.

So what if you could make those kinds of little events happen more often? Wouldn’t it be great if — when you were sitting at home or in your office — you could see your friends in the neighborhood? Maybe you could even see if one of them was interested in finding a snack for lunch!

Yahoo! has a way for you to do just that. We’ve made an application called Friends on Fire that brings together Facebook and our Fire Eagle project to help you quickly and easily share your location with your trusted friends. And you can post little messages on the map, too, to recommend bars or restaurants, or to suggest meeting up for a beer!

We like to describe Fire Eagle as a place to store information about your location. You can get your location into Fire Eagle by using all kinds of different Fire Eagle updaters — from iPhones to websites. And then — if you want — you can choose to share your location with all kinds of applications all over the Internet. There are over 70 different applications in our gallery at the moment, and more appearing every day. We also give you control over how much you choose to share with these different applications. You can choose to share your cross-street or your country, you can hide yourself from everyone, and, of course, you can change your preferences at any time.

In addition to Friends on Fire, we’re also launching a new way to update Fire Eagle — a Firefox extension that adds a button to your toolbar. With one click, your location is instantly shared with your trusted friends on your favorite services.

And finally, for the developers among us, we have three new announcements that you can read about over on the Yahoo! Developer Network blog.

In the meantime, we hope to see you guys trying out the Facebook app! And don’t hesitate to let us know what you think about it — we love to get your feedback.

Tom Coates
Head of Fire Eagle

What’s with August 15th and creature hoaxes? Thirty one years, a SETI scientist in search of extraterrestrial life received a radio signal from deep space… but he could never detect it again. Today, two guys claim to be in possession of a bona fide Bigfoot carcass… but sounds like the DNA sample was part human but mostly possum. Ok, no joke, here’s what we tracked down this week:

• Olympic redux: If you missed last night’s one-two punch from the American gymnastics team (probably because you were getting eight hours of sleep as I piled on more Olympics-induced sleep deprivation), Yahoo! Search has come up with a tool that lets you get photo highlights of the biggest moments of the Games. Just go to Yahoo! Image Search, type “Olympics” plus an athlete’s name or a sport, and you’ll get an up-to-date photo carousel of images from Yahoo! Sports’ coverage. You can just toggle through the various images without leaving the page. So you can stay on top of the Games without bags under your eyes. More here.
• Surfing Safari: If you’re a Machead and you want the speed and helping hand of Yahoo! Search from your browser toolbar, go install the Inquisitor plug-in for Safari. After acquiring the software in May, we’ve been quietly sprucing it up with technology from Yahoo! Search BOSS to make searching faster. We also gave it a design and interface facelift. And finally, we sent it to a few Berlitz courses, and now it speaks eight new languages — Japanese, Korean, Traditional Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and German. Smarter, faster, and multilingual. Not bad for a few months. More here.
• Fire Eagle soars: The Web started out not really caring where you were. Now it seems like more and more services have found geographic religion. If only you had a digital switchboard that could update all of them with wherever you are — from state to neighborhood to street corner. Enter Fire Eagle, our new application for sharing, updating and managing your location information with Web services and mobile products. It also lets developers add location services to their applications. No more wandering clueless in a new city. No more missing out on a friend who’s just a block away. Check out some of the 50+ applications already running on Fire Eagle. More here.

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Location informs so much about where we go, what we do, and who we see. As the Web continues to evolve beyond the browser -– to mobile phones, devices, desktop widgets, etc. –- where we are when we come in contact with the Web becomes more important. Imagine being able to walk around town, whip out your phone, and quickly find events, a great new restaurant, or even people nearby.

Enter Fire Eagle. Fire Eagle is like a switchboard that allows you to easily update, manage, and share your location information with Web services and mobile products. One of the coolest things about Fire Eagle is how it helps you control your location information. You choose which Fire Eagle applications you want to share your information with and how much detail you want to share about where you are –- as broad as country or state, to as detailed as zip code or cross streets, and everything in between.

As a platform, Fire Eagle lets developers easily create location-enhanced applications for you — maps, driving directions, local weather, traffic, nearby friends, exchange rates, time zones, local radio, public holidays –- the list goes on and on. Since Fire Eagle launched in private beta in March, developers have signed up in droves and built some great apps. Go check out some staff picks now in the gallery.

Fire Eagle is about making everything on the Internet more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location. Start taking advantage of all the cool location-based services at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

P.S. – Fire Eagle was created out of our Yahoo! Brickhouse office in San Francisco. The Brickhouse team is holding a party to celebrate the launch on Thursday night, at 330 Ritch, and they would love for you to join them!

Ride the Fire Eagle, grab some afternoon delight…

March is a great month to get your geek on. Tech conferences flourish: O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conference, now in its seventh year, heralds springtime in San Diego. South by Southwest (SXSW), Austin’s annual music, multimedia, and film extravaganza tests the stamina, sociability, and interaction skills of thousands web developers and designers from all over the world, with more than a week of panels, presentations, and parties.

Last Wednesday at ETech, Tom Coates from Yahoo!’s Brickhouse invited participants to “ride the Fire Eagle.” His keynote announced the developer’s beta launch of Fire Eagle, “a secure and stylish way to share your location with sites and services online while giving you unprecedented control over your data and privacy.” Fire Eagle invitation cards flew out of the booth and into the hands of hundreds of developers attending the event.

O’Reilly Media also hosted Graphing Social Patterns (GSP), a new conference held in conjunction with ETech, focused on the business and technology of social platforms. Yahoo! Developer Network participated in ETech and GSP as a gold sponsor. Following Charlene Li’s Monday morning keynote on the Future of Social Networks (you can view her presentation deck here), MyBlogLog product guy Ian Kennedy announced the opening of MyBlogLog’s APIs.

MyBlogLog is a Yahoo! service that powers the “Recent Readers” badge, which you’ll find on our sidebar and all across the blogosphere. MyBlogLog is a tool that lets people learn about their community of readers, and gather and display pointers to all the online social services they use. By opening its APIs, MyBlogLog gives developers tools to create interesting new social mashups and news ways to visualize online communities and social activity data.

Speaking of social activity streams: dozens of Yahoos participated as speakers, panelists, booth staffers, and attendees at ETech, GSP, and South by Southwest. Take a peek at some highlights of our ETech presence, captured by Ricky Montalvo for the Yahoo! Developer Network theater:

Havi Hoffman
Yahoo! Developer Network

Photo from James Duncan Davidson