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

Daily.

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