"We think it's a good thing that users can lie," said Tom Coates, of Fire Eagle, the location-tagging app Yahoo just opened up to all comers-and-goers. It's a topical spin on a problem as old as Dodgeball, the first widely adopted friend-finding cell-phone app. Dodgeball and its kin are ostensibly used for telling your friends where you are. But really? They're even better for avoiding people. Using a "mobile phone to play hide-and-seek is a welcome development for social-mapping services," claims Newsweek.com, based on a few users' own predictably poor personal habits of relying on technology to do their dirty work for them."What's appealing to some may feel a little creepy to others," Newsweek continues. The same goes for the users when signing up for these location-based apps in the first place. What are you asking a friend, exactly, when inviting them to view your movements around a city? It really means you want to see where they are, and who else they may be with. You're not going for friendship so much as mutually assured surveillance. That users are lying may be painful to friendships, but it's all that's holding the social fabric of these apps together. At Brightkite, glossing over the truth is even built in as a feature: Instead of your precise address being sent as an update, you can opt to have only your city transmitted. Of course, some of your "friends" will figure out immediately that you don't trust them with your whereabouts. All the more reason not to lean on the "social Web" to manage relationships. The very people most inclined to make use of these apps are the ones who could never pull off fibs with any delicacy in person. Ideally, new services would take people out of the equation even more, and let computers have a go at these problems from start to finish. When I ask my phone where the nearest cafe is, why can't it just know that I mean "the one where my ex isn't currently on a date with someone else, ignoring her and refreshing Twitter"?

Programming Django isn't quite the same as dropping Dorothy Parker quips at lushed-out parties, but Pownce cofounder Leah Culver's line last night warmed even my cynical heart. Scene: We were mobbed briefly around the photo booth at 330 Ritch, former gay bathhouse and setting for the public launch of Yahoo's location-based mobile social thing, Fire Eagle. "Melissa, I want you to meet Cal Henderson," she said, presenting Flickr's head of engineering. "He's a fan ..."And here Mr. Henderson shook my hand and didn't mind at all when I said it was really his longtime companion Tom Coates, part of the Fire Eagle team and old queer hand of the blogosphere, whom I came out to meet. "We're here in my circle of exes," Culver continued. "And I have one to toss back at you," I added. The rest of the evening is lost in a botched Flip video file sync — no footage for you — and a flurry of text messages wherein I tried to locate the guy getting a handjob in the men's room at the end of the night. No help from Fire Eagle there! Tip me if you know who the lucky jack was? (Photo by Andrew Mager)

Facing a takeover bid from Microsoft, Yahoo has pinned its hopes on new product launches from its best and brightest. In less than 11 hours, one of them, developer Tom Coates, will take the stage at ETech, Tim O'Reilly's conference outside San Diego. His mission: to roll out the long-delayed Fire Eagle, a system for announcing your physical location to other websites. Possibly. This evening, Coates has been announcing his location, and his situation, via Twitter. He's in Carlsbad, the site of the conference. Things are not going well: "Listening to Chopin. It is not calming me the fuck down. Grr!" In other Twitters, Coates moans about the number of tasks left to do. While he doesn't specify, it's hard to imagine he's doing anything but fixing bugs

Desperate to deflect attention from impending layoffs, Yahoo's top management has put pressure on the ranks to deliver some splashy product launches and distract the media. Gullible as the tech press corp is, they'll likely fall for it. A top candidate: Fire Eagle, Yahoo Brickhouse's long-delayed location-data tool. Brickhouse chief Salim Ismail, embarrassingly, has been talking up the project long before it was actually ready; he last promised to deliver it by the end of November.