Yahoo Fire Eagle Launched
Given the amount of buzz over ‘the next big thing’ in Web 2.0 (or are we now moving to Web 3.0?), which appears to be geo-location, it was inevitable that soon one of the bigger established players would launch a platform. Hence Yahoo’s Fire Eagle didn’t come as much of a surprise when it launched. As with all apps that take personal identifiable information, it lets you control how you manage your data and what you share. In this case you can update the service with where you are and that can then go to other services such as BrightKite that actually use the information. BrightKite’s probably a good example as it allows users to interact based on where they are and what they are doing and it also pushes location data back to Fire Eagle. Sites like Dopplr are also on board so you can share information about where you will be that can propogate across sites rather than being trapped in one site.
All this is great for the average busy researcher. I can see where my colleagues are (providing they’re subscribing; big ‘if’) and arrange to meet up or they can contact me. The mobile phone service is especially interesting as it simply pushes where I am to my services and there is no need for me to do anything. Suddenly my social network becomes a hell of a lot more interesting and I’m meeting new colleagues who have similar interests and are in the same location.
The downsides are the usual ones for personally identifiable information (PII). I’m now not just giving up information on what I am interested in but where I am and if that’s being pushed out to a variety of services they have that information too. OK, they can promise that they will delete that information when I ask them to and Yahoo are very good at giving the option of switching the service off when the user asks for it but that information is still out there in the public domain. As we’ve seen recently with the Google/YouTube and Viacom legal case, once a user gives out their attention data into the public domain, it can have unexpected consequences. In that case, attention data had the potential to become PII just by the sheer volume of it and the open-ness to data mining to create a unique profile. Imagine what could happen with geo-location data that has far more potential to uniquely identify an individual.
All in all, though, I think that geo-location services have a great deal of potential in higher and further education. JISC now have quite an extensive geo portfolio and some of those services, such as Digimap, are already helping researchers whereas some others that are embryonic such as GeoXWalk are very close to providing a service. Match up, say, GeoXWalk with a geo-tagging app such as FireEagle and location aware instruments and you can then start creating intelligent meta-tags for where data is created as well as when and with what. That could create some pretty exciting new research with derived data, license agreements permitting ;-).
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