TomTom Shuts Down FireTom
According to a message on Twitter from the FireTom folks, TomTom attorney’s have demanded that FireTom be closed down.
Sorry guys, the site is closed on demand of TomTom lawyers. Thanks for using it. – FireTom
For those who don’t recall, FireTom was a program you could add to certain TomTom devices that could periodically share your current location over fire eagle
We had previously asked TomTom about applications like this that are taking advantage of the now defunct TomTom SDK. At the time (well more than a year ago) they said they were not going to go out of their way to support such customizations and they could likely break in the future. However they didn’t indicate they would actively block such applications. It seems like they might have changed their minds.
Perhaps they just didn’t like the product name, or the domain name that included “tomtom”. However if that was the case FireTom might have just changed their name, and of course other sites exist with “tomtom” in the name which so far TomTom doesn’t seem to have gone after.
Perhaps this is an indication that TomTom might be building such a location sharing feature of their own, perhaps to integrate with Fire Eagle. Of course they already have a “TomTom Buddies” program, so perhaps they saw this as competitive to their own feature.
Whatever the reason, the FireTom site is already down and it doesn’t seem likely it will come back.
Is there other geo-aware platforms that gives you the ability to manage location information or decide how — and with whom — to share it?