Fire Eagle launched to developers yesterday. I’ve been keeping my fingers crossed that it is going to provide the location deduping I want for the mobile city review service I’ve been building. The idea behind this is to get people reviewing bars or restaurants by sending mini-reviews via text, which include their location. The downside of relying on this manual approach for feeding in location information is that I need to resolve different references to locations into one. When I heard about Fire Eagle, I reckoned on this being a prime candidate to help me out.
Checking out the developer docs, I’m very happy to hear that:
“Fire Eagle provides a few other API methods that developers can use to disambiguate the names of locations”.
Awesomeness. Now to see if it works…
Update: FireEagle uses the same geocoding as Yahoo! Local, so you may as well just use that for deduping.
2 Comments
I work am the founder of a starter in this space
http://localhero.biz/
and I must say why would I bother with Fire Eagle. Servers can already guess location and moreover I think we will move to a system where user agents have an location disclosure opt in built in.
iN which case why use a third party
Hi LocalHero, thanks for the comment. You might bother with Fire Eagle to help people who submit articles to your site have their location detected automatically. I can see value in a system that aims to give the “best guess” of what a location string really refers to. Deduplication with location is really tricky - if you have some suggestions, I’d love to hear about them.
J.
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