Setting up Fire Eagle is pretty easy to do. You’ll want to start by heading over to the Fire Eagle website to sign up for an account. Once you’ve created your account on Fire Eagle you’ll need to come back to mapme.at and go to your “Location Sources” page (labelled “Sources” on your homepage). Scroll down until you see the fire eagle logo and you should see a link labelled “Click here to authorize your FireEagle account for use with mapme.at”. Click on that link and you’ll be taken to the Fire Eagle website and be asked whether you want to allow mapme.at to update and access your location.

We recommend that you allow mapme.at to both update and read your location, and that you give us access to your exact location. You can then use our controls to allow your contacts to have different levels of access. Whether you do this or not is up to you of course.

If you agree to let mapme.at access your location we will ping Fire Eagle around every 5 minutes and ask them for your location. If it’s changed since the last time we looked, we’ll store it in our database. Also every time you update your location on our site, we will let them know (if that’s what you have requested).

Having support for Fire Eagle gives access to a huge number of services for updating your location, take a look at the Fire Eagle Gallery to see which ones are useful for you. Not all services are compatible with Fire Eagle though, and some are unique to mapme.at. I’ll be posting a few more blog posts telling you about more of these methods over the next few days.

How about another scenario, a few months ago I twittered:

Just rowed many miles down river. Barbecue now then bit more rowing to the beach.

If you know I live in Liverpool you might find that message a bit odd, have I really been rowing down the River Mersey?? In fact on that day I was halfway through a holiday to southern Turkey and we’d spent the day rowing down the Xanthos River. Being able to know my location when reading my past (or even current) twitters could obviously be useful.

Finally, here’s a snap taken when I was visiting San Francisco in May:

Me and the Golden Gate Bridge

Most people probably know that the Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco, but not everyone is going to know that it’s on the South West coast of the United States. Being able to find out where I was when I took a photo is a great way of making it more interesting.

So there you have it, location is important. Being able to find out where people are now is important, being able to find out where people have been is also important. Why am I telling you this? Well this is what mapme.at is all about. I’ve been tracking my location in various ways for 2 years now. Up to a year ago I was finding it difficult to track myself as much as I would like. I setup mapme.at to try to make things easier, before mapme.at I had a single method that required me to have GPS coverage and to run a Java app on my phone. The original version of the site took this up to three separate ways of logging where I am. There are now 8 ways to log my location on mapme.at and considering one of those methods is Fire Eagle there’s potential for many more. Over the coming days I’ll be writing a few more posts to try to cover all of the ways that you can update your location here, if you’re interested in trying it out head over here for the first of these posts!