Fire Eagle launches – want an invite?

UPDATE: The invites have now gone.

I have four Fire Eagle invites to the first four commenters on this post. These are also one-time invitation codes and can’t be reused. No idea what I’m talking about? As you’ll note from Michael Arrington’s story and the longer review:

It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.

Interestingly British startup Dopplr says it has been working with the Fire Eagle team to allow you to link your Dopplr and Fire Eagle accounts, and share your location with other trusted services that you choose and control:

We can send a location update to Fire Eagle when you’re travelling, so that other services can act on that information. Of course, this can also be turned off at any time. This is similar to how we update your Facebook newsfeed on travel days if you use our Facebook application.

It’s worth noting as an aside that Fire Eagle’s team counts among its team long-time Brit blogger and uber-developer Tom Coates, who knows the Dopplr guys well.

However, right now the Fire Eagle beta has next to no functionality – you can type in your location, which the service notes and then places on an embedded Yahoo map. That’s it. To get an invite after these 4 are gone you can also try Inviteshare.