I love the concept of Yahoo's new Fire Eagle. As Mark Josephson of outside.in said to me the other day:

Fire Eagle is a location wallet

It's a web service that you can tell where you are at all times and manage what web services get to use that info and under what circumstances. It's very focused on security and privacy and rightly so. Here's Yahoo's description of Fire Eagle.

I've set up a Fire Eagle "wallet" and have connected it to dopplr and outside.in radar. There are a bunch of other apps that work with FIre Eagle and they are listed in the Fire Eagle app gallery.

So here's the thing. Fire Eagle needs to know where I am without me telling them. When I first set it up, I chose dopplr as the service that tells Fire Eagle where I am. And when I arrived in San Franscico the other night, I got an alert from outside.in's radar about something interesting happening near where I am staying in SF. I thought - "awesome - this works".

But this morning I got an alert from outside.in's radar about something happening in Boston (where I am headed tonight). I went to Fire Eagle and sure enough it thinks I am in Boston because dopplr does (my mistake).

That was a big realization for me. Using web services that rely on data input to update Fire Eagle makes no sense. It needs to be updated by my mobile devices.

So I figured that I'd put a Fire Eagle mobile app on my iPhone. Except there isn't a native Fire Eagle iPhone app. Here's what they suggest:

Be on the lookout for more ways to update your location:

• Get Dopplr to tell Fire Eagle the city you're in.
• Check into your favorite places—and update Fire Eagle—with Brightkite.
• Update your location on your OSX dashboard with our very own Fire Widgets.
• Use ZoneTag, My Loki or Navizon to broadcast your location automatically.
• Try out Searchquest GPS for iPhone or visit m.fireeagle.com on the go.

But here's the thing. I don't want to use BrightKite, ZoneTag, or My Loki. I am sure they are all great mobile social nets, but I have enough social nets in my life right now and I think Facebook and Twitter are doing pretty well supporting me when I am on my mobile.

I'll see if I can get Navizon (which I like) or Searchquest working well on my blackberry and/or iPhone and use that to update Fire Eagle.

But Fire Eagle has been under development inside Yahoo! for the better part of the last year. Why couldn't they build light simple apps for windows mobile, blackberry, symbian, and iPhone that you can download and use to auto update Fire Eagle? That's really what I want.