A Minor Nit With Fire Eagle

Launched today at Etech, Fire Eagle is a new Yahoo service that lets apps easily store and retrieve your location. Its big selling point is that it can take almost any input (postcodes, addresses, cities, lat/long pairs) and then give a heirarchal output to apps, with levels of precision that the user chooses.

Unfortunately, while almost all of these levels ("country", "city", "exact") make sense whichever country you're in, there's one that doesn't. In the UK, "postal" will return a full postcode, which locates you to a building (at best) or a street (at worst). In the US, by contrast, it reutrns a five-digit zip code, which covers about 5000 people, and is obviously far less revealing. (I've no idea what it does outside these two countries, but I'd love to know.)

Now, obviously I can work around this in a couple of ways. Firstly, I could be fuzzier about the location I give to Fire Eagle, but this is silly; then nobody gets the better data. Much better, then, to use one of the other choices that are offered, but this begs the question; why have the postal option at all?

Still, it's early days, and as well as looking forward to seeing how the service (and its uses) evolve, I'm hoping there'll be a few tweaks for international consistency within the service itself.