“This, is what geotagging photos is all about, it’s about having enough of them, millions and millions, so that they can be thrown through complex analysis, allowing them to be matched up, combined, calculated and computed into a geo-spatal context. It’s also about people sharing the world about them. Start of mini rant: You’ll see that all these advances are made by Google and Microsoft …” – Rev. Dan Catt.

I try not to let it get to me anymore that we’ve been actively de-prioritizing geo as an axis of understanding the human experience as everyone else has been spinning it up..

Other folks are talking about and writing about the long germinating, launched in beta, location broker from Yahoo’s Brickhouse, Fire Eagle.

I wanted to call out just a couple of the cool, and non-intuitve decisions they made.

Is NOT a consumer brand

Fire Eagle is a service for building and sharing location data. Its the application built on top of it that you’ll interact with, unless you’re building stuff.

Fire Eagle does NOT manage the social graph

Its a service for sharing your data with friends (or services, or your toaster), but it doesn’t know who your friends are. The social graph has been outsource. Best example of a small piece loosely joined I’ve seen in a long time.

Cares about privacy and ease of use

Ninja privacy is built in. But you don’t have to care. The TOS requires developers to discuss how the data is used. And privacy levels are front and center. And from day one data is delete-able, and in fact data is flushed on a regular basis.

Built on OAuth

Yay!