By 2008, phones were starting to know where they were — and every app wanted a piece of that fact. Fire Eagle's job was to sit in the middle: one place a person could update or share their location, and one place every other app could ask for it, always subject to permissions the person controlled directly.
The interesting design problem wasn't the API. It was building a permissions model precise enough that "my location" could mean neighbourhood-level to one app, exact coordinates to another, and nothing at all to a third — set once, and respected everywhere.
Fire Eagle didn't want to be the destination — it wanted to be invisible plumbing that a dozen better apps could build on top of. That's a strange thing to aim for as a product lead, and a genuinely useful discipline: build the thing other things need, then get out of the way.