Fire Eagle WordPress Plugin Prototype

For quite a while I have been working on a WordPress Plugin for Fire Eagle, a new Yahoo! service for centrally storing your current location and providing this data to authorized applications. I wanted to have a little play with it and thought about creating a WordPress Plugin with a widget on the homepage on my blog that displays my current location on a map, the local weather and the local time. A couple of days ago I was able to finish a first prototype and put it on the homepage of this website.

Fire Eagle

So what is Fire Eagle? What can it do? At first, let me put a quote here from the Fire Eagle website:

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.

It basically enables you to do 2 things:

• Applications/Devices can store and update a users current location centrally
• Applications/Devices can retrieve a users location and use that data to provide Location Based Services

Knowing where your user is located enables the provider to give more customized information to the user and implies a couple of applications quite quickly:

• Local Weather
• Restaurants/POIs/Touristic attractions
• Journey planning, getting from A to B
• Closest shop to buy thing X

There are already a couple of applications that already make use of Fire Eagle, like Wikinear, Plazes, Dopplr and Brightkite.

WordPress Plugin

Just to play around with it a bit, I decided to do a WordPress Plugin that includes a widget which displays the following:

• my current location (retrieved from Fire Eagle)
• local time at my current location (retrieved from World Time Engine)
• local weather at my current location (retrieved from Google Weather API)

After installation and authorizing the plugin to retrieve your location from Fire Eagle, it displays the retrieved data in the admin panel and lets you set typical API settings, like your Yahoo! Application ID (for using Yahoo! Maps API) and the interval for checking for location updates on Fire Eagle.

When the widget is added, it displays the information mentioned above on the page, as it can be seen on the homepage of this site. If JavaScript is available, the widget is progressively enhances to display a map with the current location in a modal window on the page (powered by YUI).

As it says in the heading, this is still a prototype so there is nothing to actually download at this stage and to try out for you guys. I hope I can release some version soon for you to check out. As mentioned by Ben, having your current location on your blog is nice, but being able to retrieve the current location for every blog user might be of even greater value. This would give you the opportunity to geotag blog entries, adding an appropriate Microformat and so on. If I find the time at some point, I might work on that. But that is a big “if”, unfortunately.

Conclusion

Fire Eagle is of special interest to me as my diploma thesis was dealing with Location Based Services, including writing a J2ME application for Nokia Series 60 mobile phones. I strongly believe that knowing the location of a user and actively using that information to provide added value would create a whole new level of “Wow, this is really useful”. Fire Eagle itself has a nice walkthrough for how you do the authorization steps, storing the tokens and bringing the user back to your application. To get it working on my hosting provider I still had to hack around quite a while, but was glad in the end I got it working. It is a little feature and a nice mini-project to familiarize myself with the code and the concepts of Fire Eagle.

Fire Eagle is still in private beta, so you need to sign up to get an invitation code. I still have 2 invites left, so if you are interested, give me a shout.