Fireball: Save Time on the Nightly Party Crawl at Web 2.0 Expo
by
on April 22, 2008,
Every conference has an application that is poised to break out. Web 2.0 Expo may already have its "It App" in Fireball. Quickly making the rounds of the Twitter back channel, Fireball is an app that combines the location-based functionality of Twitter with the location-based features of Yahoo's Fire Eagle to let you keep track of all your Twitter friends.
Fireball has soft-launched here at Web 2.0 Expo for conference attendees, and currently works only in San Francisco. Once you sign up for the service (and for Fire Eagle if you haven't already done so), you authorize Fire Eagle to reveal your location to Fireball. Send a Tweet either using a direct message or @fireball alerting your location, and Fireball will plot your location on a map so your followers can find you.
Fireball promises additional commands coming in the future, but at the moment, the following work via direct Tweets to the @fireball Twitter ID:
* Send a Direct Message like "? alone to see where all your friends are (via KML).
* Send a Direct Message like "q kellan" to find out where kellan is.
* Send a Direct Message like "q brickhouse" to find out who's at the Yahoo! Brickhouse
* Send a Direct Message like "q privacy" between 3:50PM and 4:40PM on Friday to see who else is at the Casual Privacy panel.
We'll see how quickly it spreads. So far, only one person I'm following has it added, and Plazes also has added Fire Eagle support as well. I'm not a big Plazes fan myself, finding it too stalker-esque, but for finding people and parties as they move at a conference, Fireball looks like a good fit.
