Yahoo announced the official release of its geolocation platform, Fire Eagle, which up until now was only considered an experiment, with the company studying if it has the potential to become a successful business. Starting with March, close to 50 developers tested all the aspects related to the platform, looking to make sure that it will work as designed.

Fire Eagle provides personal location information, offering geo-related services and social network features once users type in the details of their current location. It also provides a very good privacy feature, allowing users to restrict the access to the details of their whereabouts, providing only general information to certain groups, such as the city’s name. Another similar option lets users press a ‘hide me’ button which completely shuts down the location reports for a period of time.

The service has already been adopted by a large number of companies, and without a doubt, many more will follow. Among the ones using Fire Eagle, Yahoo mentioned Pownce, the free social networking and micro-blogging site, the blog platform Movable Type, the news and community site Outside.in, Dash, Doppir, Loki, Plazes, Outlot, Lightpole, Brightkite, Navizon, Spot, Dipity and Zkout. Having these companies, which are generally location service providers and small social networks, register so quickly to the service is surely a plus, but the long term plan involves collaborations with the major social players on the Web, such as MySpace, Facebook or FriendFeed and also news and data Web sites like CNN and Google Maps.

All these companies included Fire Eagle’s functionality into their applications, in order to ensure that users get properly informed about their friends and many other useful things, such as nearby businesses.

Yahoo co-founder David Filo explained the basic motivation behind the general release the project: "We really wanted this functionality for Yahoo services. But by opening it up for the rest of the Web, consumers are more likely to adopt it." He also added: "We’re still pretty early stages in this location stuff, but if we can get wide adoption of Fire Eagle across the web we can become a leader."

There is still a lot of uncertainty on how will Yahoo make a profit off its new release, as there are several possible directions. One of the simplest would be to incorporate the location service into its online advertising services, allowing advertisers to access the users’ information in order to provide news and offers available in their area. There is also the possibility for Yahoo to assist its partners with better software development tools, in order to better their Fire Eagle services.

All these plans will include only the users accepting to make their location details (zip code, city, region, state, or country) available for general viewing. The option was humorously described by Tom Coates, head of product at Yahoo’s Brickhouse, who said that: "We think it’s a good idea that users can lie about where they are. Like I don’t always tell my mother where I am. "