Fire Eagle Mashes Up Social and Local on Facebook

Yahoo announced today from the South by Southwest show that its Fire Eagle geolocation service has launched a Facebook application.

As we wrote when Fire Eagle launched, the service lets you identify your location in lots of ways, including mobile devices, browser toolbars and a new extension to the Firefox browser. These data are then pulled in by third parties Web sites, like Outside.in, that can benefit from showing you content that is location specific.

The latest Facebook integration, known as Friends on Fire, allows you to see where all your friends are on a map. The location data come from any of the touch points Fire Eagle has created for users to identify their location. An additional touch point comes in the form of Facebook users self-identifying their location for friends to see.

It also extends the basic functionality of identifying your location to include a host of other local/social uses. Users can append notes to points on a map (think favorite local spots) and choose to have these updates automatically populate their Facebook news feeds. They can also view all the recent notes and locations tagged by anyone in their Facebook network.

Uses who emerge could make Facebook more locally relevant: finding things to do and to see and to buy locally, in the context of where your friends are (where to meet). Based on what the product is going for, it will probably make more sense on the mobile device and in that respect, is similar to popular tools like Loopt and Google’s Latitude.