Life is grand

Watching Tom Coates introduce FireEagle at eTech. One of his key points is that past and current web-apps tend to be monolithic. If a web-app wants a location feature then it is built into the web-app. The coupling is very tight and even if the location feature is made public it’s interface is often very specific to the web-app that spawned it. Tom says this isn’t the smart way to do things, that, paraphrasing, “deciding what not to build is important.” So along comes FireEagle to provide the location features you need for your web-app. You and other web-apps interface with it in a consistent manner.

All well and good. But shouldn’t FireEagle be distributed? Not just distributed amongst Yahoo! servers but distributed amongst companies and individuals around the world. Let anyone run their own FireEagle instance. That way when Yahoo! gets bought by Microsoft and Microsoft kill the FireEagle project at Yahoo! your app which uses FireEagle isn’t left in the dark. You just switch your FireEagle URL to another provider. Or there is a round-robin list of FireEagle providers that your app. automatically cycles through.

To retain competitiveness though I’m not saying FireEagle goes open-source. It just needs to say “here is the FireEagle interface specification, go forth and multiply.” Yahoo! can then run the best, most scaleable, most efficient FireEagle instance and retain a competitive edge. Another factor of this competitive edge would be Yahoos! internal data-set of locations and how “Waterford, Ireland” can be mapped to latitude and longtitude or “Waterford, co. Waterford, Ireland, Europe, Earth, Sol.” Yahoo! would be able to offer a more accurate/fine-grained service than, say, I would if I ran FireEagle.

This causes some problems for the idea of FireEagle but Quality Of Service is a well understood problem in other industries.

So how about it, FireEagle, may I run my own instance? (I haven’t read the TOC of FireEagle yet…)

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