I don’t normally write about my work here, but thought I’d mention that I just published my mock-up of the SPLASH project on the University of Sussex SPLASH project blog: http://splashproject.blogspot.com/2007/10/mock-up.html

Please comment on the project blog itself.

No, it’s just International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Pirates were cool in like, 2004. Now it’s all about bandits in my opinion. Talk Like a Bandit Day anyone?

Just signed up to Pownce, which appears to be Twitter, with file sharing and without forcing incorrect grammar on the user. Also you can group your contacts into ‘sets’ which you choose yourself. At the moment it’s invitation only/join a waiting list. I set my facebook status to ‘Anyone on Pownce?’ and within half an hour, I’d been sent an invite code. Not bad.

The name is a bit dodgy in my opinion – too close to ‘ponce’, but maybe they were playing on gaming lingo’s ‘pwn’ (meaning ‘own’, as in, ‘you totally got pwned’), and mixing that in with pounce (like a cat?).

Anyway, in the sign-up process, they’d clearly been taking notice of gender debates and, taking a light-hearted approach to the complicated subject, came up with this:

Brilliant. This beats facebook’s tolerance of selecting neither gender by about a million. FYI, I chose ‘Lady’.

Beth’s pownce

Also, they only have 4 templates at the moment, but they’re very nice.

Signing up to Second Life today, and the sign up form forces you to choose your gender:

This is pretty normal for registration purposes. I’ve collected quite a few snapshots of similar ‘error’ messages (will add these to the post later), from places you really would think wouldn’t care what your gender is (weather sites?!). I guess it’s good for targeted advertising to know your market, but shouldn’t it be up to the user whether they want to give out that information (without being blocked from registering)? Still, Facebook wins as the only place I remember to allow me to leave my gender blank.