Upcoming.org Founder Creates Fireball (Fire Eagle + DodgeBall + Twitter)
Ahh, convergence, ahh, the ability to pinpoint your friends on your
mobile phone. I've been waiting for this to happen.
Sent to you by Ian Mulvany via Google Reader: Upcoming.org Founder
Creates Fireball (Fire Eagle + DodgeBall + Twitter) via TechCrunch by
Erick Schonfeld on 4/22/08
Remember DodgeBall, the early social mobile network that languished
after Google bought it? So does Leonard Lin, a founding member of
Upcoming.org who recently left Yahoo, where he organized Hack Days. He
helped write the code for FireBall, a clever mobile geo-location app
that brings back the promise of DodgeBall using only other existing
services with public APIs.
FireBall is a way for people to keep track of where their friends are
on your mobile phone. It uses Yahoo’s Fire Eagle as a geo-location
broker and Twitter. It is basically mashup of the two services, plus
some functionality from Upcoming.org. People add all of their contacts
on Twitter and authorize Fire Eagle to share their location with
Fireball. “Instead of creating a new service that forces you to add all
of your friends,” says Lin, “we end up using Twitter for messaging,”
When you want to find out where your friends are who have also signed
up for FireBall, you send a message to a Fireball account on Twitter.
You get back a text message with a Tiny URL link. When you click on the
link, it opens up a KML file that launches Google Maps on your cell
phone and hows you all your Twitter friends as pinpoints on the map. So
your Twitter contacts serve as your mobile social network. You can also
Twitter in your location. Simply mention a room at a conference, for
instance, and it can pinpoint exactly where you are through integration
with Upcoming.org,
FireBall launches today in a private beta for attendees to the Web 2.0
Expo. The first 100 TechCrunch readers who are attending Web 2.0 Expo
and send an email to “Fireballme+TechCrunch [at] gmail [dot] com” will
recieive an invite. Right now, the service only works in San Francisco.
CrunchBase Information Fire Eagle Twitter Upcoming Information provided
by CrunchBase
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered
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