Geekblok

As some of you know, I’ve been messing with Fire Eagle for some time now already (I was lucky enough to get an invitation) and yesterday I noticed the site went public. That means you, yeah you, can sign up now too.

But what is and does Fire Eagle? Not a whole lot to be frank. It’s basically a broker for your geo-data. It can share your position on earth with a number of other services, like wikinear (see previous post).

I do applaud the initiative of Fire Eagle though. It’s a Yahoo! application and for a change, they didn’t simply buy a company. Nope, they’ve created this themselves! I’m happy to see this and hope the other big players will do the same: be creative, invent new stuff (knol is not innovative at all, to me).

Since the launch of Fire Eagle, quite a few websites have joined the effort and use the API provided. That includes Pownce. The application gallery is growing and I’m really interested to see what other websites will join and be created, inspired by this functionality.

With a plethora of social websites, it’s hard to keep track of everything. And like with all itches, people will try to make money out of it and come up with sites like FriendFeed, Lifestream, etc.

But what if you want to build something similar yourself? You’d have to download all your RSS feeds, combine them and most likely filter and sort them. Yahoo! Pipes comes in handy!

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For too long, I have ran around with cellphones that weren’t considered hip or cool. Only once before did I have a camera on my phone, but without an USB cable or bluetooth, transferring the horrible quality pictures were a no-go area. Time to change that! And so I did. I got a nice Nokia N95 8GB and am loving it every day (note: I have no experience with cool phones, so anything would probably be awesome to me).

The thing I like best is the WiFi adapter in there. Followed by the equally aweome GPS receiver. A new world opened, for there are so many nice things online that mobile users could use. In the few days I have been the owner of this device, I found the following great apps:

• ZoneTag
• FireEagle
• Fring
• Yahoo! Go.

ZoneTag let’s you upload your photos to Flickr, while geo-tagging them staight away. Woohoo!

FireEagle can record and share your physical location (which can be set by the previously mentioned ZoneTag). It’s fairly new and open by invitation only (if I am not mistaken). Since it’s so new, there’s not a whole lot to see yet, but imagine the possibilities for a programmer. No doubt this will expand fast and really cool applications will be build around it.

Fring is a nice messenger. If you’re online, why not have the ability to chat (and/or update your twitter account)?

Yahoo! Go, again a Yahoo! product, is as they say “everything you need, all that you love”. You can browse Flickr, send emails etc. etc.

Of course I’m biased and appreciate Yahoo! applications, but seriously, what companies beside Yahoo! really focus on the mobile market?

What other mobile applications are there? While waiting for comments, I’ll go play Monkey Island again, for ScummVM also works on the Nokia N95

I’ve ranted about OpenID before and in my predictions for 2008, I even wrote that OpenID will get supported more and more.

Today, Yahoo! announced that their OpenID implementation (as a provider) has opened up as a public beta. This means that you can use your Flickr photo URL (or custom me.yahoo.com URL) to log in to a lot of places. This will most likely boost the OpenID implementations (for now you can offer your service to (theoretically) all the Yahoo!/Flickr users).

Let’s see if my OpenID prediction becomes reality. As for the measurement, I’ll use The OpenID Directory. Currently, they have listed 471 websites.

Will Google and Microsoft follow soon with OpenID?

Yahoo! Search has a lot of cool features, that really take searching to a next level. Back in the day, when Google came into focus, the clean interface and awesome search results defined the standard for modern search engines. Yahoo!, however, has beaten Google, in my humble opinion, by completely reinventing the search engine.

Google’s search results are not what they’ve used to be. I usually show people the awesome Dutch website zoekmachinetest.nl. It shows you a the results of the major search engines in Dutch in random order so you can see for yourself which one you really like best. Since I couldn’t find an English version of this website, I’ve created one myself: searchenginetest.swal.org. Go check it out!

But let’s look at some of these new features!

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