Congratulations to our friends at Yahoo Brickhouse. This week they’ve launched Fire Eagle, “an open platform that helps users take their location to the Web while giving them the ability to easily control how and where their location data is shared.”

By registering for an account, you can use a variety of websites, phones, devices and services to tell Fire Eagle where you are right now. Naturally Dopplr is one such application. If you enable Fire Eagle on your Dopplr account then we’ll publish a location update to Fire Eagle once a day, just when you’re travelling.

Once Fire Eagle knows where you are, you can authorise other services to access that information and do things for you using it. At Wikinear you can access wikipedia pages chosen based on where you are in the world. outside.in can send you news alerts about what’s happening in your current neighbourhood. You can publish your location in a sidebar on your blog with the Movable Type plugin. And if you change your mind, you have complete control over the level of detail the applications can access, and can revoke the permission at any time.

Because Fire Eagle is an open platform, anyone who wants to code an application can get a developer account and create a new location-aware service without having to worry about whether you’ll be updating it with an iPhone, a laptop or your Dopplr itinerary. We’re big fans of this modular approach and think it’s the next step in the evolution of the web. Dopplr itself uses the services of many 3rd-party applications, whether it’s our Facebook app, our import of trips from Google Calendars or Upcoming events, social network import from LinkedIn or Gmail, or all the places we use Google Maps and Flickr Photos to give you better information on your trips.