What's Your Gender?

If you've ever designed a form to collect demographic information, chances are you included a question about gender.  It probably was a drop-down list with two options:

1.  Female

2.  Male

A couple weeks ago I managed to get my hands on an invite to the private beta of Pownce, the lightweight Twitter/IM/Email app created by the Web 2.0 dream-team of Leah Culver, Daniel Burka, and Kevin Rose.  The service has been receiving rave reviews across the blogosphere so I figured I'd sign up to see what all the fuss was about.  I was sleepwalking through the standard registration form when I came across the "gender" question.  Here's what it looks like:

 

 

I can be a dude?  A bloke?  A chicky-poo?  How fun!  To me, this is a great example where infusing a little bit of innovation into something as simple as a sign-up page provided a "surprise and delight" moment for me as a customer, and made me want to dig deeper into the application to see what other interesting innovations the team had in store.

Speaking of innovation, my name is Kevin Leneway, and I'm the newest member of the InnovateOn team.  I'll be using this blog as an opportunity to share the latest and greatest, biggest and not-so-biggest innovations that Microsoft, our partners (such as Vertigo, Ascentium, Vital Images), and the Web 2.0 community are rolling out over the upcoming year. 

For those of you early adopters who are innovating on our latest platforms, we appreciate the fact that you are placing big bets on our new technology and we want to help you along the way.  Innovate-On offers training, code samples, logo certification, and go-to-market opportunities for applications developed on new technologies like Vista, Office 2007, Dynamics, and many more.  Check it out at www.InnovateOn.com and feel free to drop me a comment below.

Kevin Leneway, Technical Evangelist