Fire Eagle from Yahoo is a quite unique player in the field of location based services - they don't really claim to be of any use by themselves as a web application but rather aim to create an location layer with an open API. They use the term location broker for the kind of service they provide, hoping that other companies or divisions within Yahoo built their location based services and businesses on top of it.
Of course they hope those services will be amazing.
Being in a rather early state and with access for only a few thousand developers worldwide, Fire Eagle is still a relatively unknown service and is not actually used by any other Yahoo property yet. Only the even more obscure Zone Tag from the Yahoo research division at Berkeley has a (one-way) interface to Fire Eagle so far. Services like Upcoming, Flickr and Yahoo Local are yet to be connected.
Yahoo Local did just place me in Bonn, but probably it's using the My Yahoo settings.
Outside services like Plazes, Dopplr and Brightkite can connect to Fire Eagle already - but just one-way.
They all feed their information to Fire Eagle, which is a good thing - but they don't use the data from Fire Eagle, even if they're allowed to do so. And in the case of Dopplr they actually do take the information from Fire Eagle, show it somewhere well hidden, but don't set the user's location based on this information. From a user's perspective that's a hint of FAIL.
Brightkite's Brady sees a scalability issue:
We don't currently support pulling from FE because there is no scalable way to consume FE information...we'd have to poll the FE status for every FE user every few minutes...that's fine for a few people, but not for thousands of users.
and Felix from Plazes "puts the blame" both on what they think that users want:
actually most people want plazes to set your location, because they are using the plazer as a convenient updater. also with the iphone plazer coming up it will make setting your location to a plaze really easy. and more or less as a byproduct set your location on fireeagle as well.
and on the missing granularity of the Fire Eagle data:
obviously it would be nice if fireeagle can set your location on plazes and we are currently trying to figure that one out. the problem is that if you are at "300rd street" according to fireeagle, which plaze are you at? "wired" or "yahoo brickhouse"?
Both also say they're in talks with the Fire Eagle folks to resolve those issues - so there is some hope that those issues are solved until Fire Eagle goes out of the closed beta and my contacts at Brightkite can - for a lack of a better word - enjoy my location updates from Plazes.
; "Wired GPS-Issue")