This is annoying. I’m trying to sort out some of my Google groups, which are all registered to my Yahoo email address. But I also have a Gmail account which I want to combine with my Yahoo Google account. Google will let me add alternative email addresses to my Yahoo Google account, but it won’t let me add my Gmail account. It tells me here that I have to delete my existing yahoo related Google account, then open up my Gmail related Google account, then associate my yahoo address to that. But all my groups and history are connected to my Yahoo Google account! I don’t want to have to re-join all of them again.

Tags: yahoo, google, gmail, Google groups

Plaxo just put me off by forcing me to choose my gender:

The only options were male or female. C’mon Plaxo, get with the program! This is the modern day and you should know better than to only give us these limiting binary options with which to define ourselves (and must you force us to define ourselves in those terms at all?). What about everyone between or outside these options?

When you’re building a social networking site you should have advisors on identity politics, since you are getting your users to create identities on your site.

An example of gender being handled in a lighthearted and positive way is Pownce.

Tags: plaxo, gender, social networking, queer, feminism

I got tagged (by Rowan Stanfield) in a game of blog tag a while ago and I only just got around to doing this. So here’s 8 random things about me.

1. I’ve done a round-the-world trip twice. My favourite cities have been Melbourne, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver and New York (and of course Brighton!). New Zealand is over-rated. New Delhi (and surrounding area) is depressing. Hawaii is full of tourists. Fiji is beautiful but full of honeymooners and Christians.

2. I am impressed by films involving aliens, robots, zombies, gore, explosions, and big guns.

3. I am scared of the dark. Possibly due to over exposure to things in point 2.

4. I am constantly looking for a new job, even when I like my current one. I think I like to keep up to date with what opportunites exist, and how much I *could* earn.

5. despite point 4, OKCupid.com tells me I am unambitious. I think that’s because I put lots of things before money/ownership, but I think OKCupid has ambition confused with materialism. I’ve been on OKCupid for years and years. It’s good for self-obsession but nearly everyone on there is really ugly.

6. I play World of Warcraft. My main character is currently level 45. I don’t obsess over it, but have been known to play for about 5 hours in a row on occasion. Even though I find it repetitive, it’s quite a good way to unwind. When I was about 16 I had to ban myself from playing Doom because I started to tense up when approaching a corner in real life, envisioning flaming skulls coming at me from the other side. I went cold turkey on it.

7. I’m totally fat-ist. I think people should know when to stop eating and just not be fat. If you eat too much, you are greedy and weak. It’s a sign of lack of self control. I just don’t like looking at fat people. I know this is hypocritical because I’d quite like to gain about a stone and I find that hard. Oh well, I’m a hypocrite and a bad person.

8. I did a Biology degree and specialised in evolution and mating behaviour. So I know lots of strange facts about slug mating rituals, field mouse penises and how environmental resources relate to monogammy/polygammy. I do tend to apply my knowledge of evolution to understanding human behaviour, relationships and flirtation.

OK so now I have to tag 8 people and they can do the same if they like (but they don’t have to):

Jeremy Keith (adactio)

Christine Hennessey (evilolive)

Shannon Ritter (micala)

Dave Stone (builtbydave)

Josh Russell

Trevor May (antikewl)

Richard Bacchus (dubnacious)

Paul Burgess (delarge)

Andy Budd

You can now basically do anything you’d ever want with the new privacy controls within Facebook. So, if you want to make a list of ex-boyfriends and stop them seeing certain information about you, you can! Or, if you make a list of hotties, you can make a special photo album just for them!

Lists kind of work like groups as far as communication is concerned, but at the moment people don’t know what lists they’ve been put into by other people – they are for an individual to group/categorise their friends, for their own purposes.

I only hope the ways I’ve categorised my friends within Facebook never gets revealed to my friends!

Interestingly, this blog suggests that you can “shield your friend list from any or all of your friends and networks”, whereas this blog says the opposite, that “Friend lists are “private groups” of your friends. No one can see the friend lists you make.”  Hopefully the first blog wasn’t talking about these new friend lists that a user creates and names accordingly, but was talking about a user’s main, complete, Facebook friend list.  If a user’s main Facebook friend list is called a friend list and the lists a user creates to organise their Facebook friends is called a friend list, talking about this could get pretty confusing.