Yahoo is testing a new locative service, “Fire Eagle.” Yahoo describes it as a ‘location data broker,’ which is useful enough. Navizon, for example, is a service that uses wifi and cell phone tower locations to triangulate your location; I’m trying it out right now and it found me, on my laptop without GPS, down to the street block level. If I wanted to, I could link up Navizon to Fire Eagle and make my exact location available. This will be even more useful when there’s a Navizon client for my now-outdated first generation iPhone without GPS. Navizon, or the native GPS functionality of the next generation iPhone, can automatically and continuously update Fire Eagle with my location.

But why would I want it to?

It might be useful have my general location available, for example published here on this blog, so that my friends and family could look and see where I am, but I don’t want the world to know that I’m on Old Country Road in Westbury, NY. Instead, something like “Long Island, USA” would be adequate. And that’s what Dopplr does; it takes location information from Fire Eagle and applies a set of filters to it and then makes the filtered information available. (Dopplr supposedly also identifies friends travelling to the same city as me, a problem I don’t need solved. Who needs that problem solved?) I use Dopplr now, published via RSS on the righthand side of this blog, to update my location via Tripit, yet another service that consumes and standardizes travel itineraries. I adore Tripit.

Fire Eagle’s position as a broker is smart, I think; there are all kinds of location-information providers (Navizon, car GPS systems) and lots of services that can consume that information (mapping services, geo-tagged photos), but too often there’s no way to go from one to the other. Plus, crucially, there is a tremendous privacy component to location; I like having the insulation of a broker like Fire Eagle between the raw data of place and that which is publicly available.

For me, as an end user, the developer release of Fire Eagle is still of limited value. I see where it’s going and how I could use it but the range of supported applications (Dopplr and Moveable Type but not Tripit or WordPress, and certainly not my camera or my car or my kid’s embedded beacon. I joke.)

All of these bits, of course, are just small specific pieces of functionality; the beauty lies in the elegant composition of them, a process that is only just beginning. A more fundamental question might be the business model for this brokerage service and, given Yahoo’s recent travails, the viability of the company itself.