Last week, Yahoo launched Fire Eagle at ETech. Fire Eagle is a platform for sharing location information about yourself. The most powerful piece of this service is its privacy consciousness. Users who publish their location via this service have very robust controls regarding how third party applications access to their data. While not much value on its own, Yahoo is hoping that community developers (like Technarium!) will step in to provide novel uses of the service via their API.

While experimenting, I developed Eagle Perch. This small application will sit in the background of your PC. Whenever you return from idle, it will update Fire Eagle with whatever location you specify. Presumably, when you return from idle on a PC, you will be at that PC’s location. For machines that don’t change location often, this can be a good alternative for location sharing for those who don’t have GPS-enabled devices. Put it on your home and work PCs. Combine this with other location publishing applications that are sure to emerge, and you’ll have an alternative to GPS that’s pretty strong.

Eagle Perch can be downloaded here.