Google wants to create a new language for the web. That idea will have to be accepted by all other browser vendors. Nowadays that doesn’t just mean Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Opera, but also Nokia, Samsung, RIM, and a host of minor ones. Why would they do as Google tells them?

That’s his reaction to Google’s DART project. Also check out 2ality’s post which gives an overview of DART.

I pretty much ageree with PPK here. I am sure DART is awesome. I know a lot of smart folks worked on it. But I’m not convinced the web needs another front-end language, particularly one that is pushed by a single company. Even Adobe’s cross-platform, ECMAScript 4-compliant ActionScript is rapidly losing ground to the open web.

For a discussion about why “Other” is problematic as a category, see Sarah Dopp’s piece from November, 2010 “Gender is a Text Field” (Diaspora, backstory, and context). She’s much smarter than I am about gender and identity, so I’ll point you there.

I, however, question the need to ask for a user’s gender at all. As Munroe said in his Google+ post:

They also (obviously) want to know more about you so they can serve ads; advertisers care about gender. But again, that’s no reason to make gender public.

Identity is a multi-faceted thing. One part of a person’s identity may well be subsumed or tempered by another aspect of it. Aside from perhaps personals ads, is there a reason to collect it at all?

By demographics, I am a married, college-educated, employed, black woman in my mid-30s. Those demographic datapoints suggest that I would care about working mother issues, Tyler Perry, and church. Ads served to me based on those assumptions, however, would miss their target. I am a child-free atheist and quite intent on remaining so. And no, I don’t like Tyler Perry.

About the only thing a gender field tells you is whether a person identifies as male, female, or neither. But if advertisers insist that they need to know gender so they can misfire ads, I propose using either or both of the following strategies:

• Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender
• Provide a preferred pronoun field

Make gender a text field and use taxonomy or heuristics to guess gender

It’s a simple idea: put a text input field in the user interface. Users can enter what they wish. Then using a list of something gendered — male and female words (“dude” / “dudette”), names, perhaps closest connections — we can guess at the gender of the user in question.

Of course, this approach is problematic in that it is imprecise. Techie and tomboyish women may be misidentified as male. But I suspect such misidentification would actually make ads more relevant to those women.

Provide a preferred pronoun field

Even better: let the user set the pronoun he or she or ze or zir prefers. This settles questions such as those faced by xkcd where a bot or user interface needs to be grammatically correct. But it is not necessarily a definitive statment about gender.

And again: give users the option to make that data public, private, or leave it out altogether.

(Via The Mary Sue)

*Google has changed this (or will soon).

Typing addresses into Google Maps on a U.S. English keyboard in Norway (maps.google.no)? No matter. Google has you covered. Click to embiggen.

One of the best outcomes from November’s Wave Protocol Summit was a proposal for Wave to enter the Apache Software Foundation’s incubator program. Apache has a fantastic reputation for fostering healthy open source communities that create great software. Last week, that proposal was accepted, and we’re spinning up the project infrastructure so that the community can continue to grow in the Apache way.

That’s news straight from the Google Wave Developer Blog.

[Via Mashable]

One reaction is to diversify: Hotmail instead of Gmail, MapQuest instead of Google Maps, AOL Instant Messenger instead of Google Chat ’ though that would mean losing the accumulated benefits of linked services. Another reasonable response is to focus efforts on improving our (new) media literacy so that we’re more mindful of how much even free stuff can still cost. If we don’t force ourselves to be aware of those trade-offs, we risk stumbling into an increasing dependence on yet one more company that’s too big to fail.

From Google Everywhere by Nancy Scola in The American Prospect.

Google pretty much runs my life right now, and considering this recent Buzz fuck-up, I’m not okay with that. Facebook’s handling of privacy and user data issues are precisely why I avoid it. Now that Google is trying to out Facebook Facebook, I might go in the same direction.

Trading privacy for convenience is not something I oppose. Hell, Amazon has an 11 year search and purchase history on me and does a pretty effective job of getting me to buy more stuff because of it.

I had few problems with GMail at first because the targeted advertising is automated. But I am not a fan of articulating every social connection I have in public. Yes I am on Twitter, but it is a mostly a mix of people I know, people I sort of know, and people I don’t know at all. My email connections are different because they contain information about connections to people that I have not otherwise articulated in public and connections that are very loose. That’s Buzz’ fatal flaw as far as I am concerned: it assumes a lot of things. Sometimes that’s good because it assumes incorrectly — it obfuscates. And sometimes that’s very bad.

That Google made Buzz opt-out shows either stupidity, callousness, or arrogance. Not cool with any of the above. It’s encouraging that they’ve since made it easy to opt out. But I think the original decision is a sign of the decision-making culture at Google. My advice is to use Google services carefully.

With little fanfare, Google made its personalized search system the default this week. Whereas searchers had the option of turning on this feature before, now users’ search histories are automatically factored into the engine’s mysterious algorithm. This means that results users actually click on after a particular search will be ranked higher in subsequent searches with similar terms.

From Search Me in Seed.

Also see: Personalized Search for Everyone

From the Google Blog post Introducing Google Public DNS:

Today, as part of our ongoing effort to make the web faster, we’re launching our own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS, and we invite you to try it out.

Most of us aren’t familiar with DNS because it’s often handled automatically by our Internet Service Provider (ISP), but it provides an essential function for the web. You could think of it as the switchboard of the Internet, converting easy-to-remember domain names — e.g., www.google.com — into the unique Internet Protocol (IP) numbers — e.g., 74.125.45.100 — that computers use to communicate with one another.

More about Google’s Public DNS service on the Google Code blog.

As extraspecial posted on Twitter if you value your privacy in the least, you’ll avoid Google DNS like the plague. Methinks Google has just crossed into Eviland. Actually, they crossed the border many years ago, but I digress.

We have many Google (and Google Apps) users using Zoho applications and integration between Google and Zoho Apps is increasingly becoming one of the most requested features. We previously integrated Zoho and Google at Sign-on level (both Google & Google Apps) and now, we are extending this integration to the application level.

Zoho is my preferred online application suite. Nice to know that it now plays nice with Google’s offerings.

Closure Compiler, Closure Library, Closure Templates, and Closure Inspector all started as 20% projects and hundreds of Googlers have contributed thousands of patches. Today, each Closure Tool has grown to be a key part of the JavaScript infrastructure behind web apps at Google. That’s why we’re particularly excited (and humbled) to open source them to encourage and support web development outside Google. We want to hear what you think, but more importantly, we want to see what you make. So have at it and have fun!

• Closure Library API Documentation
• Closure Compiler
• Closure Templates

UPDATE: Turns out, I wasn’t wrong. I was just clairvoyant . WorldMate is working on an Android version of its application.

Hrm. It appears I was wrong about a WorldMate application for Android. I managed to find an unused download page (by typing “android site:www.worldmate.com” in Google) that listed Android as an option. I assumed — and y’all know how the rest of that goes — that meant there was a WorldMate for Android available now. The HTC device (running S60) pictured on the homepage added to my confusion. Nope. No, WorldMate Android app. My bad on that. The post has been updated below.

Yes, I stole the title from Chris Elliott‘s post on iPhone applications for travelers.

I’m (currently) an Android girl, so I wondered whether it was possible to find similar applications for my G1. I couldn’t find perfect matches for Elliot’s list, but here’s what I came up with.

Where

• What: Where is a series of GPS widgets that you can use to find points of interest, find the cheapest gas, check the weather, or find an area brewery
• Sort of like: Aroundme and Cheap Gas! for the iPhone
• Cost: FREE, but ad-supported.

WorldMate

• There is no WorldMate for Android. What: As Elliott explains, WorldMate offers a bunch of features, including a currency converter, flight updates, integration with Google maps, and an online travel planner with the ability to consolidate your itinerary.
• Sort of like: Um, WorldMate for iPhone.
• Cost: Most features are FREE. Some require a $39.99 subscription.

WeatherBug

• What: Location-aware weather reports for 8,000 U.S. cities. Displays the current temperature in the Android status bar.
• Sort of like: He didn’t mention a weather app, but I am including one anyway.
• Cost: FREE, but ad-supported. Don’t like ads? Try The Weather Channel‘s application.

BistroMath

• What: Determine who owes what and how much to tip — in case you’re not down with using the built-in calculator.
• Sort of like: CheckPlease!
• Cost: FREE

Unfortunately, a FREE flight tracker isn’t yet available for Android. But if you really need one, FlightStats costs $5.99.

Do you use a travel-related Android application? Tell us in the comments.

So I ask you: What are your favorite Android applications?

Please share:

• The name of the application
• What it does
• Whether it’s free, paid, and/or open source

I’m looking for a great to-do list / task manager (GTD not necessary) in particular.

Tip Jar is site where you can submit a money saving tip / idea and vote on ideas submitted by other Tip Jar users. It’s like Digg in that regard, except that what’s submitted isn’t news published elsewhere, but original(-ish) content.

Tips are broken into nine categories, including “At Home,” “Finance,” “Shopping,” and “Cars & Transit.” There are some pretty good tips in the database now, and users are adding new ones all the time.

It’s is quite the timely showcase for two of Google’s showcase products.

Tipping points from the Official Google Blog.

For this tutorial, you will need:

• A Zen Cart-based shopping cart
• A Google Analytics account and the tracking code for both conversions and page views.
• Experience with PHP and MySQL programming

Also check out Google’s support article How do I track e-commerce transactions? and become BFFs with the Zen Cart wiki.

Creating a custom functions file

Create a file to house your custom functions. Name it whatever you’d like (with a PHP extension, of course). Put it in your includes/functions/extra_functions/ directory.

A word of caution: I created these functions with my own SQL, outside of the Zen Cart framework. There may be a better way to do it.

In the file you created above, add the following code:

# get the product ID out of session key
function custom_get_prodId($productkey){
	$pid = explode(':',$productkey);
	return $pid[0];
}

#get the product data
function custom_get_product($prodID,$return='all'){
	global $db;
	reset($data);
	$q = sprintf("SELECT
			pd.products_name,
			pd.products_description,
			cd.categories_name, p.products_price
			FROM categories_description AS cd, products AS p, products_description AS pd
	 		WHERE  p.products_id = 183
   				AND p.master_categories_id = cd.categories_id
   				AND p.products_id = pd.products_id",$prodID);
	$res = $db->Execute($q);
	return $res->fields;
}
# get the current user's data
function custom_get_userinfo($custID){
	global $db;
	reset($data);
	$q = sprintf("SELECT
			ab.entry_street_address,
			ab.entry_postcode,
			ab.entry_city,
			ab.entry_state,
			c.countries_name,
			c.countries_iso_code_2
			FROM address_book AS ab, countries AS c
			WHERE customers_id=%d
			   AND ab.entry_country_id = c.countries_id
				  ",(int)$custID);
	$res = $db->Execute($q);
	return $res->fields;
}

Adjust the names of the tables if you have added a custom table prefix during your Zen Cart configuration. We’ll use these functions to get us the user data and product data we need.

Edit the checkout success and global footer files

Add the conversion tracking code — provided by Google Analytics — to the checkout success page template. It’s located in your templates directory, includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE_DIR/templates/tpl_checkout_success_default.php.

Also add the regular Google Analytics tracking code to your footer file (found in includes/templates/YOUR_TEMPLATE_DIR/common/tpl_footer.php).

Below your Google Analytics code, but also in your footer file, add the code below.

<?php
# do this on the checkout success page only.
if($_GET['main_page'] == 'checkout_success'): 

$userdata = $_SESSION['cart'];
$moreud = custom_get_userinfo($_SESSION['customer_id']);
?>
<script type="text/javascript">
pageTracker._addTrans(
    "<?=$userdata->cartID; ?>",
    "www.YOURDOMAINNAME.com",
    "<?=$userdata->total; ?>",
    "",
    "<?=$_SESSION['shipping']['cost']; ?>",
    "<?=$moreud['entry_city'];?>",
    "<?=$moreud['entry_state'];?>",
    "<?=$moreud['countries_name'];?>"
  );
<?
# for each product ID key in the userdata session
foreach($userdata->contents as $k=>$v):
	/*
	the product id gets stored as an array key as xxx:funkymd5key
	ex: 183:fw920e8ktw327uio67xew9mn. custom_get_prodId extracts
	the product id part of that key.
	*/
	$pid = custom_get_prodId($k);
	$data = custom_get_product($pid,'all');
?>

 pageTracker._addItem(
    "<?=$userdata->cartID; ?>",
    "<?=getProdId($k); ?>",
    "<?=strip_tags($data['products_name']);?>",
    "<?=$data['categories_name'];?>",
    "<?=number_format($data['products_price'],2);?>",
    "<?=$v['qty']; ?>"
  );
<? endforeach; ?>
pageTracker._trackTrans();
</script>

<?php endif;
} // flag_disable_footer
?>

I have only used the new interface for a grand total of ten minutes, but I can safely say that the 2.0 version of Gmail’s mobile app is a worthy upgrade. I’m using GMail mobile on a Nokia N80, running the S60 platform, 3rd edition.

What’s new?

The hot new feature is, undoubtedly, support for multiple accounts. The first version of Gmail Mobile only supported one account at a time (though, technically, you could have just logged in using a different account). Version 2.0 includes a menu option for adding additional accounts.

I’m also digging the ‘Mobile Drafts’ feature. Several times I have started an e-mail message in the car or on the train, only to have to stop mid-message because the light changed, or I reached my stop. With mobile drafts, I can return to the message later. A HUGE improvement over version 1.0.

Also new: The ‘Show data use per session’ feature. For those mobile users (outside of the U.S., mostly) who have metered, not unlimited, data plans, this feature is a little bit of a Godsend.

Another improvement: Speed. This version of the Gmail Mobile application feels faster than the previous one, even when using a secure connection.

Gmail mobile 2.0 is available as an application for Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Blackberry and iPhone.

Possibly related: My essential mobile applications