Check out this image:

You know that it’s a viusal trick… but you still try to focus. Painful, eh?

I’m a bit cranky today. I’m usually very happy to look at new social networks services and share my thoughts with site creators, but i’m *really* tired of having the same automatic grumbling reaction concerning one issue: the ordering of sex identifiers during sign-up.

If you’re going to alphabetize everything else in your sign-up, alphabetize sex. Male / Female is only a clear reminder of who you value in your system. I can deal with the abuse of the term gender, but c’mon now.. give me one good reason for not alphabetizing sex terms other than cultural sexism?

So, if you’re a website creator (or know of one), (let them) know that this practice is really insulting.

Companies currently making me cranky:

• Friendster
• Buddybridge
• ChiaFriend
• Everyone’s Connected (even defaults to male & straight! grrr)
• It’s Not What You Know
• Sona (Man/Woman on outside; Male/Female on inside)
• Ryze

Companies who get it:

• Tribe (even has a “prefer not to say option”)
• FriendSurfer
• Ringo

[Note: “Prefer not to say” is very appreciated in sites not dedicated to dating… Because what’s the importance of sex other than reminding the user that you’re selling their data to advertisers?]

Update: The worst abuse is MySpace which not only assumes male/female but in asking you who you are looking for, it inverts it to say woman/man. Very male-centric.

Nerve just put up a list of the top 50 unsexiest things, including:

Friendster.com. For a few months, it was a secret cute-kid sex party. Then all your exes heard about it. Then Courtney Love got on it. Then strangers started insisting you’d shared some magical experience with them outside Tuscaloosa. You told them you’d never been to Tuscaloosa and that they must have the wrong person. Then they told you your pet hamster’s name from when you were five and you started shaking.

In meeting people to date, the generic “you” is theoretically looking for one lifetime partner. S/he wants to be introduced to many candidates and feels little consequence if things don’t work out. Worst case scenario: two of them meet and call you a shit.

In meeting people for business purposes, you are motivated to connect with many people who provide you a diverse but meaningful social network. You have limited time to engage with people, so you must choose wisely and then slowly massage that relationship, particularly if the person you want to know cares little for you. The people you meet in business are often intertwined so you have to play nice from the getgo.

These are two totally different ways of operating your social network. Yet we think that the same architecture makes sense. Hmm.

My inner child is ten years old!

The adult world is pretty irrelevant to me. Whether
I’m off on my bicycle (or pony) exploring, lost
in a good book, or giggling with my best
friend, I live in a world apart, one full of
adventure and wonder and other stuff adults
don’t understand.

How Old is Your Inner Child?
brought to you by Quizilla

Last night, i was on a panel at the Hillside. Afterwards, someone asked me how i managed to cram a whole lot of theory into 8 minutes. The answer was simple: the press. I’ve found that the press is one of the best bouncing boards for working through academic ideas. They ask silly questions, have totally different motives, and are so far outside of academia that everything seems new and interesting. Other academics are jaded, too involved in the details and otherwise unable to provide that fresh perspective. I’ve given up paying attention to how they might quote me, because i don’t care; i simply enjoy the conversations.

Last week, i was talking to a reporter. She asked me a question about what makes interacting with people on something like Tribe or LinkedIn different than Friendster. This prompted a little a-hah moment. Dating is all about people matching.. people meeting other people. Classifieds are all about people connecting with *information.* Say what you want about the effectiveness of meeting people online, but the Internet has certainly been successful at connecting people to information… for almost everyone. And the Internet has definitely been successful at helping mediate relationships that already exist.

Even when you break down the kinds of relationships that form on Friendster, you start to realize that Friendster is most useful as an information gathering tool. (Yeah, yeah… a people DNS.) Familiar strangers. Headhunters using it to look up people. Tracking down old friends. Information, not necessarily socialization. Of course, information about people is far more fascinating than information about random objects. But getting information about people doesn’t necessarily prompt a desire to interact with or engage them.

Must process more, but when i said it out loud, i realized that the dichotomy of people/information is a really powerful axes for reflection on these tools.

Dina Mehta has an interesting entry called Social Networks and Brand Identity where she describes Kapferer’s Brand Identity Prism (a combination of 6 internal & external characteristics that comprise a consumer’s reaction to a brand). It seems as though she’s doing a lot of crunching on ideas in the knowledge management space.

Most of what she focuses on are the more business-y approaches, but her entries are a reminder that i need to learn more about the academic theories underlying knowledge management (’cause that’s the type of information management that i want to be playing with).