Yahoo unveiled its location tool Fire Eagle last night, in a move it hopes will support a new generation of location-based services for the web.
First released in a closed trial in March, Fire Eagle allows users to update and manage information about where they are, so that third-party services can connect and use that information to tailor their service.
Users can update Fire Eagle once, and that will update their location across multiple sites they use. The service is opt-in and users can choose to hide their location.
More than 50 services already use Fire Eagle, which bypasses potentially complex and expensive ways of determining a user's location.
Mobile operators, for example, charge large amounts for access to the location of their users and operate under strict data protection terms.
Fire Eagle has proved popular with the tech community because it is easy to use and lightweight, although some have called for increased control for individual users over what services can access their account.
UK travel startup Dopplr has been using Fire Eagle to help update the locations of its users, and Outside.in uses the location information to personalise news stories relevant to that neighbourhood or city.
Other services, such as Brightkite and Lightpole, enable social networking and communities around locations, while Dash uses location to update traffic information.
Fire Eagle was developed by Yahoo's startup project at Brickhouse, led by former BBC technologist Tom Coates, who moved to work for the internet company in California in October 2005.
Coates described the service as "a switchboard for location" and said the objective was to make everything on the web "more useful, fun or interesting by adding the element of location".
'We're here to help people take their location to the web by giving them the ability to control how much detail about their location they want to share and which applications they want to share it with," he added.
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