March 13, 2009, 1:10 PM — Yahoo released on Friday an application that lets Facebook members share their physical location with those on their list of friends.
The application, called Friends on Fire, uses Yahoo's Fire Eagle technology, which lets developers create Web applications, sites and services that take into account users' locations.
This "location aware" online services are becoming more popular, thanks to advances in mobile communications and the mainstream embrace of social networking.
Last month, Google launched Latitude, a service that lets users of Google Maps and the iGoogle personalized home page share their locations with their acquaintances and communicate with them via e-mail, IM, text messaging or voice calls.
For its part, Yahoo describes Fire Eagle as a "switchboard" with which users can manage and share their geographic location with varying degrees of detail and access controls. Currently, more than 70 applications have been created that use the Fire Eagle technology.
Yahoo also released a Fire Eagle "updater" for Firefox, so that users can update their location information within the browser's interface.
