Yahoo has officially lauched its Fire Eagle service, with the help of which users can "store and manage information about their location;" furthermore, as it is open, Fire Eagle can be used by networked services to respond to one’s location, thus helping with searches for friends, services or local information.

Leaving users aside, Fire Eagle will be equally attractive to developers, as it can make their work significantly easier; they can now just direct all of their attention towards ways to use location within their own services, without worrying about building the infrastructure. With the use of Fire Eagle and the rest of the geo technologies Yahoo provides, any service can be easily and cheaply made location-aware. 

The new launch could turn out to bring about very good advertising posibilities, as companies would be able to market services and goods, depending on where Yahoo’s users and their potential customers are; however, Yahoo said ad planning would be taken care of later on.

As everything revolves around the users’ location, privacy is a very important issue here; people are in complete control of how much information is shared with the Fire Eagle’s partners. Users can hide out if they choose to and at any given time, they can delete all their data.

So far, about fifty developers have implemented Yahoo’s platform into their apps; among them, we find Brightkite, Movable Type and Pownce. Fire Eagle can be downloaded free of charge at http://fireeagle.yahoo.net.