Tom Coates
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Projects / Fire Eagle

Fire Eagle

A location broker for Yahoo, built around one idea: you decide who gets to know where you are, and how precisely.

IMG PLACEHOLDER — Drop a dashboard screenshot

By 2008, phones were starting to know where they were — and every app wanted a piece of that fact. Fire Eagle's job was to sit in the middle: one place a person could update or share their location, and one place every other app could ask for it, always subject to permissions the person controlled directly.

A dial, not a switch

The interesting design problem wasn't the API. It was building a permissions model precise enough that "my location" could mean neighbourhood-level to one app, exact coordinates to another, and nothing at all to a third — set once, and respected everywhere.

Who can see where you are
DopplrCity level
BrightkiteExact
Unknown third partyNo access

Built to be forgotten

Fire Eagle didn't want to be the destination — it wanted to be invisible plumbing that a dozen better apps could build on top of. That's a strange thing to aim for as a product lead, and a genuinely useful discipline: build the thing other things need, then get out of the way.

Quick facts
Year2008
StudioYahoo Brickhouse
RoleProduct lead
ShippedPublic API
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