Gender is frequently treated as a binary or “N/A” option in online forms with the purpose of collecting demographic information, analytics being the life blood of many online applications.
Freed from this need to collect information, the open social network Diaspora turns Gender in to a text field, freeing us to put whatever we want.  Which begs the question: how accurate can these binary or opt out analytics be at identifying trends and behavior when they don’t account for something as fundamental and varied as gender?  What else are we missing?