Today is Ada Lovelace Day, a day dedicated to celebrating the world's first computer programmer and to share inspiring stories about women working in science, technology and math. Surely some of the most significant technical work done by women since this day last year includes the creation of what is said to be the fastest-growing social network in history, Google Plus.

Launched on June 28th and just opened to the public at large late last month, Google Plus is a feature-rich social network with variable privacy and sharing settings at the core of its experience. Who were the women involved in building such a big, important technology? We asked, on Google Plus, and were told about twenty two of them profiled below. They are an incredibly accomplished group of people and a great source of inspiration for young women interested in science and technology - or for anyone else who could use some powerful role models. You should share this list of women with the girls in your life, though, that's what Ada Lovelace Day is all about.

There were far more people, and far more women, who helped build Plus than those below, of course. And the features keep coming, too. Please feel free to add suggestions of Engineers and Designers and as they come in, I'll add them to this sharable Google Plus Circle that anyone can subscribe to all at once.

(For example, after puting up this post Tammy McLeod pointed out that she contributed code to Plus as well. Tammy, it just so happens, is the reigning US Sudoku Champion!)

Ana Ulin has been a developer at Google since 2005, after she graduated from the Chalmers University Of Technology in Sweden. She's lived in Sweden, Switzerland, Spain and Palo Alto. She loves to knit and was educated in Electrical Engineering. Ulin is in the picture above in the top right.

Frances Haugen is the Google Plus Profiles and Search Product Manager. She's been at Google since 2006, has a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin and an MBA from the Harvard Business School. Haugen takes interest in design and data. Haugen is in the bottom left of the photos above.

Denise Ho is a Stanford grad in Computer Science and a product manager at Plus, with a particular interest in the photos product.

Brynn Evans is a UX designer on Plus. We covered Brynn's joining Google earlier this Summer.

Shimrit Ben-Yair is a Product Manager, and has an undergrad degree in Computer Science, Statistics and Operations Research from Tel Aviv University and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Olga Wichrowska is an MIT educated computer scientist and software engineer. She's pictured above on a mountain in Utah.

Kelly Ellis is a software engineer on the Google Plus team. Her life is awesome and she correctly notes on her profile that bubble tea is disgusting. Ellis is the one wearing sunglasses above.

Mimi Sun does software and data visualization for Plus, and comes from Nvidia and Rapleaf.

Lea Kissner is a cryptographer formerly of NASA, Xerox PARC and AT&T.

Tammy Capistrant is an Engineering Programs Manager, has degrees in music performance and education and an MBA and has been at Google since 2003.

Janice MyintG is a Cornell-educated test engineer for Google Plus.

Emily Chang likes to use the feature in Google Plus where you only post things to your approved circles, not publicly, and I can't find out anything more about her. Chang's photo is in the bottom right above.

Sigalit Bar is in Israel and is a software engineer.

Jenny Murphy is a software engineer specializing in Developer Relations, which was what she did at Ning, too. Murphy's the one with the green hair above.

Ye Kim is the UX Lead on Google Plus Mobile and Games; she got a Masters of Design at Carnegie Mellon but began doing design for Google before then. She's been at Google since the very beginning of the company, in 1997. 2007. (Funny typo in Kim's bio - oops!)

Jen Hsieh is a Google+ Mobile Photos Software Engineer, coming to the company from Research In Motion and Morgan Stanley. Hsieh's photo is in the top left.

Roshni Malani is a software engineer with a PhD. in Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego. Malani's photo is the second from the left on the bottom.

Karen Liu is a software engineer who started at Google last year. She went to Carnegie Mellon University.

Joanne McKinley used to work on the Gmail mobile team, now she's an engineer on the Google Plus Mobile team.

Shailu Chauhan has been a test engineering manager at Google for 7 years.

Madoka Hayashi has been doing visual design for Google since June.

Irene Chung, Tech Lead & Manager on Google Plus, leads the stream feature of Plus, is widely admired on the team and has been at Google for 5 years, after working at Amazon and IBM.

Thank you, everyone above, for building such a compelling platform for people to share their thoughts with each other. Lives have no doubt been changed by Google Plus already and your work pushing forward the future of social networking is an inspiration.

Today, those fatwas were challenged by women across Saudi Arabia in a campaign called Women2Drive; challenged and, thanks to social media, witnessed in real time.

In addition to a coordinating Facebook page, the day of protest driven by the kingdom's women, and many of their husbands and fathers, has a Twitter hashtag, #women2drive, both de rigeur these days for any protest in the Middle East.

Orders were given to Saudi police, including presumably the religious police, not to bother women who drove today, possibly because of the global attention on the day, which is the start of the campaign. Perhaps the hope is that women will not continue to drive, as is the hope of the campaigners, but limit their protest to this one day. There may also be a misapprehension that the attention is due solely to press coverage. Given the widespread presence of "women2drive" on the Web, that may prove a miscalculation. If anyone is arrested, it will surely make it onto Twitter and if it makes it onto Twitter, it will probably make it to the more established media outlets.

Manal Al-Sharif, whose arrest after posting a video of herself driving on YouTube lent fire to this movement, was not part of the protest today. She was allowed out of prison only after she signed an agreement not to take part and with the understanding that she could be hauled back to jail at any moment.

Saudi Arabia has not seen large-scale, Arab Spring-inspired protests. In fact, the kingdom sent its own soldiers into Bahrain to help violently put down that country's protests, which damped them down but did not destroy them. This movement, however, has to be seen as an effect of the same forces and hopes that powered the uprisings across North Africa and the Middle East.

But what about women who make that kind of leap? There needs to be more stories told like that. I put out a call on Twitter and Claire Cain Miller of the New York Times said she too wants to tell more stories about brave women in technology. We live in an incredible time of cultural, economic and political change made possible by changing technology. That technology is being driven in many cases by women - so whose stories would you suggest we write about here on this blog?

ReadWriteWeb's own Audrey Watters has written about the challenges and upsides of incubating women entrepreneurs.

Perhaps the whole hero-style narrative is a bad idea, unhelpful to community collaboration just like Kaliya Hamlin argues the "war" metaphor is in rhetoric like "the identity war." "I think what is seen as heroic is a narrative of the lone cowboy," Hamlin said to me today. "Teams and communities who foster innovation and achieve together are often not seen and therefor not honored in the same way."

We've written about a number of specific women doing heroic or particularly interesting work in tech here on ReadWriteWeb. Here are 7 of my favorites - please let us know in comments or by email (staff@readwriteweb.com) whose stories are especially compelling that we ought to be writing about. Send them today, tomorrow - and don't stop sending us interesting stories about women, please. Of course there are more ways to have an awesome story than just to quit your job - that's just what got me thinking about this. Please send whatever recommendations you can of women who have great stories that people ought to read.

7 Inspiring Stories

Flickr's Community Manager Says Goodbye

When people talk about managing communities in this new online world, one name is mentioned more often and with more respect than any other: Heather Champ of Flickr. Today Champ announced that after nearly 5 years and more than 4 billion photos uploaded, she is leaving Flickr to start a community management consultancy called Fertile Medium.

Gina Trapani Starts a New Blog

Lifehacker founder and former lead editor Gina Trapani announced this morning that she's started a new blog called Smarterware.org. She says the new site has "no ads, no digg badges, lots of sentences starting with 'I'." It won't have dozens of posts daily under a rigorous publishing schedule - it will be a place for "stuff that fired off a synapse or two in my head," Trapani says.

HGTV Scores Mega-Blogger Heather Armstrong, Dooce

Home and Garden TV just announced that it has signed Heather Armstrong, author of hyper-popular early blog Dooce.com, to collaborate on unspecified "convergence media" projects.

Is Armstrong a woman in tech? As a trailblazer in the effective use of new publishing technologies, I certainly think she is.

An Inside Look Into Boxee's Systematic UX Overhaul Process

The story of Whitney Hess's work on the very hot service Boxee.

Microsoft Makes Key Hire in Researcher Danah Boyd

Microsoft Research has hired social network researcher danah boyd, probably the most high profile academic in the world focused on the emerging web and its social consequences.

How One Teacher Uses Twitter in the Classroom

Teachers are always trying to combat student apathy and University of Texas at Dallas History Professor, Monica Rankin, has found an interesting way to do it using Twitter in the classroom.

What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial's Legacy

It's not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world.

This story, about Di-Ann Eisnor's map publishing service Platial, is one of my favorite stories I've ever written.

Ready for more stories about women doing inspiring things in technology? We'll keep writing them, but we'd love your help discovering them, too.

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht

Well, of course people care. Lots of people care. Lots of people are working hard to address the issue and to better support girls and women in technology (NCWIT, Astia, Women 2.0, for example). The OSCON conference organizers did do an awesome job of recruiting women speakers and panelists. I think that's a key step in making women feel as though their voices are recognized and contributions valued -- making women feel like the (open source) technology community is something they want to be a part of.

And then there are lots of people, who when you question why there aren't more women in tech, respond by unleashing the "hatorade."

Point out that the tech industry may be exclusionary, and you will hear an old and stale argument (or, you'll hear name-calling. Or both): the tech industry is a meritocracy. Anyone can succeed if they have the brains, the skills, and the drive. There are no obstacles to anyone's participation or success in the field, barring they have the skills, smarts, and drive. No women coders? No women founders? You women must not want it bad enough.

Design programs to help foster girls in computing, help support women entrepreneurs, help retain women in IT and you are called sexist, your programs "affirmative action" (something, I take it, that's a "bad thing.") You are accused of re-inscribing the very exclusions and divisions you are trying to combat.

The hostility of some of the responses, I'd argue, belies any argument that the tech industry is truly open and egalitarian.

Someone tweeted and several people retweeted -- all with the OSCON hashtag -- the following: "At Ruby conferences they put porn in the slides, this is a Scala conference so we have math." It was a just a passing remark, and yes, I get it. It was just a joke. Ha ha ha. But it's the sort of joke you don't make in "mixed company," I'd wager, and it reveals that plenty of folks still don't see tech events as such.

Image credit: eljustino

Learnvest is another service targeting women. The site offers checklists, budget tools and action items for women to tackle their debt and increase their credit ratings. Through a point system and a number of survey-style questions, the site determines a path for improving your financial future. The only problem is that a collection of points is less interesting than the things you can buy with it - for both women and men. In the future the company plans on integrating affiliate and ad-based monetization. If they can find a way to equate tangible items (vacations, mortgages etc) to points, the service is more likely to catch on.

We'll be participating with a post highlighting an inspiring woman in tech tomorrow, but we thought this would also be a good opportunity to share the search engine below, titled Blogs By Women in Tech. It was created using the super simple and very powerful Google Custom Search tool and lets users search just the archives of more than 200 tech blogs written by women. It was seeded by the archived blogroll at Misbehaving.net and has since grown with more people submitting their blogs. I have a link to it saved on my toolbar and use it whenever I can, as a way to make sure to include women's voices in our news coverage.

Feel free to save and use the search engine yourself. If you'd like to suggest your blog or someone else's for inclusion, you can either email links to marshall@readwriteweb.com or volunteer to be a contributor through a link on the site.

So, go sign up to participate in Ada Lovelace Day and let's make sure that the next generation of young women know that there is an important place for them in technology.

The attack, posted online here, first displays a warning message and then posts Secure Science's test code "@XSSExploits I just got owned!" to the victim's profile. But if a hacker wanted to use this technique to compromise users' PCs, they could remove the warning screen and combine the link with a sensational message which users couldn't help but click. Add in some browser attack code, and before you know it, clicking a Twitter link could allow a hacker access to your computer. This, says James, "would just tear the cr*p out of Twitter." He adds, "I'm holding my breath, hoping no one does something stupid at this moment."

According to Secure Science researchers, this particular bug can be eliminated by fixing the cross-site scripting flaw, but if another similar bug were to show up on the site, users would soon face the same problem all over again.

Still, one has to wonder, why are they publishing this information publicly instead of alerting Twitter directly? Apparently, it's because the research company is concerned Twitter is not taking security seriously enough. James says he hopes this demonstration will push Twitter into making it more of a priority.

The State of Twitter Security

It's easy to see why security professionals may be worrying about the state of security at Twitter - the company has had some rather high-profile incidents as of late. Only last month, a second clickjacking attack was revealed after the company had just finished patching one that was unveiled in January. Also in January, the accounts of 33 high profile Twitter users including Britney Spears, CNN news reporter Rick Sanchez, and Barack Obama, were compromised by hackers who defaced their accounts with embarrassing and offensive messages.

At the time, Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos advised Twitter "to take a long hard look at its security to ensure that this never happens again, and regain the confidence of its members." Yet since then, more potential attack vectors have been revealed.

Staying Safe on Twitter Keeps Getting Harder

If Twitter is indeed replacing, or at the very least, augmenting email for interpersonal communications, then perhaps it's time for us to apply those same age-old rules that once applied to email - be careful what you click. Now that it's finally been drilled into people's heads that email attachments aren't always safe, it seems like we have to start again educating Twitter users that the same goes for links.

But when a service goes mainstream - like Twitter is doing now - it's going to become filled with people who won't give a second thought to security concerns such as these. Instead, without intervention on the part of Twitter to address these issues, consumers are going to end up learning "the hard way" - by becoming victims.

The security problem only gets worse when you think about how easy it is for people to create fake celebrity accounts not to mention how easy it is for Twitter spammers to join the service. Since Twitter doesn't authenticate new accounts via email, anyone can post any message from any address, real or fake. There are even opt-in services that Twitter spammers can join to quickly accumulate large numbers of followers quickly in an attempt to appear more legit.

Although Twitter is attempting to fight spam on several fronts (they're now disabling accounts that automate re-following for instance), it seems as if more and more Twitter spammers are creating accounts every day. (How many of those SEO advisors and 'life coaches' are for real, I wonder?)

As Twitter explodes into the mainstream, it may be time for them to work on addressing some of these issues before they focus on enhancements to the site like the relatively new "suggested users" section or the in-house ads - features which a few folks suspect may have something to do with Twitter's supposedly soon-to-be-revealed business model. While we understand the service needs to develop their business plan, they recently closed a $35-million financing round, which added even more cash to their previous round ($15 million). Given that they only have 20 employees, they're (in theory) only burning through around $5 million a year. We're not sure what Twitter is doing with all that money, but we would like to suggest that they use some of it to hire security professionals to help make the service safer...before it's too late. 

Even more interesting is that the simultaneous media usage for men decreases the older they get, but for women it's the opposite. Up until the age of 40, it's the women who are the better multi-taskers. Amanda Welsh, head of research for IMMI, thought the trend was surprising, given the amount of sports-related programming on the web. What does this mean? She says that they're interpreting the data to mean that "women are more inclined to multi-task than men."

What About the Digital Natives?

Arguing against hard data is difficult, but we have to agree with Amanda - this information is surprising. It seems to support the age-old theory that women, because of their "natural" abilities as mothers and in running the household, have some sort of innate multi-tasking abilities that allow them to engage in different activities at the same time more often (and the subtext implies "better") than men.

But is that still accurate? We're not entirely sure. The ability to take part in different activities when surfing the web is something today's teens and young adults, aka the "millennials'" or "Generation Y," also reportedly do well. Because this generation grew up with the internet a part of their world from the day they arrived, multi-tasking while online just became a normal part of their existence - for both boys and girls. Surfing the net while instant messaging, listening to music, and/or watching TV, is something that this younger generation of internet users are known for. And since these millennials are a part of the age range (15-48) involved in this study, you would think their learned multi-tasking behavior would have some impact on the reported results. But Instead, the results seem to uphold the more traditional view about women and their multi-tasking abilities.

Then Again, Multi-tasking Could Be a Myth

This idea of multi-tasking being a skill to boast about is left over from the days when technology like desktop PCs and email systems were being integrated into the workplace. Suddenly, HR managers were looking for "multi-taskers" able to focus on several different aspects of the job at the same time. However, in later years, it's been discovered that multi-tasking is more myth than reality, since the human brain can only really focus on one thing at a time, no matter how many activities a person is engaged in. The new advice for increased productivity is to slack off, work simpler, and ditch multi-tasking altogether.

So perhaps women sit in the living room with notebook PCs on their lap more often than men, but let's be honest - they aren't multi-tasking. They're just tuning out the TV to engage in something more interesting instead; the internet.

The Fox tweet was deleted an hour after it was posted, so the password may not have been changed. The Facebook account on Twitter just posted a link to porn, so it appears that the situation remains unresolved. Update: Twitter says it's been resolved but that users should change their passwords! The Twitter blog has just posted an explanation of the breach. Screen shots of the hacked accounts below below.

Some suspected that the hacks today were associated with the weekend's phishing attacks, but the Fox News account isn't following anyone - so no one could have direct messaged it. That's how accounts were taken over via phishing. Something else is afoot.

If the hacker is associated with the affiliate link sent out over Obama's account, it may not be hard to discover who did this. Time will tell.

Twitter co-founders Evan Williams, Biz Stone and lead engineer Alex Payne have posted no messages since the attacks emerged. This can't be good for Twitter. What major brand will be excited to sign up for the service now? Who would pay, even, to be put at such risk?

Gender is an important lens through which people communicate and that's still the case online. Below are links to some of our favorite women bloggers and some favorites from some web celebs you may or may not know. We hope you'll visit their sites and add more of your favorites in the comments.

Marshall Kirkpatrick

Many of my favorites were named by the people below, but a few unique ones include:

Anastasia Goodstein, founder of YPulse, a blog about marketing to youth that even non-marketers will enjoy reading.

Marjolein Hoekstra of CleverClogs, my RSS mentor.

Orli Yakuel, Go2Web2.0, frequently finds web apps first.

Laurel Papworth, SilkCharm, a fabulous Australian social media consultant I've just recently discovered.

Photo: Orli Yakuel, by Yaniv Golan

Sarah Perez

RWW writer Sarah Perez says our own Corvida is her favorite woman blogger, but she's got a list of others she likes a lot as well.

Cyndy Aleo-Carreira, from Profy, a leading news blog about life online and promotion for the Profy blogging platform. Svetlana Gladkova, who writes on Profy.com as well as the Profy Development Blog is also one of Sarah's favorites.

Tamar Weinberg, Techipedia, is an internet marketing rock star and a repeat selection by several people asked to make a list for this post.

Veronica Belmont is a blogger and video blogger all over the internet.

Natalie Del Conte is a blogger and video blogger for CNet/CBS.

Gina Trapani leads the fabulous blog LifeHacker

Emily Chang writes and publishes all kinds of different sites, including PicoCool and eHub. Her design company created the most recent design for RWW.

Leah Culver is a founder of standards-happy microblogging platform Pownce.

Kara Swisher writes for All Things D and is one of the most powerful people on the web.

Sarah Lacy is a business writer, author and blogger focusing on tech.

Wow, what a list!

Photo: Sarah Lacy, by Brian Solis

Frederic Lardinois

RWW's Frederic Lardinois was a little late to the game, so many of his favorites were already taken by Sarah above (whose weren't?) - but here's a few folks he's adding to the list.

Susan Mernit used to work at Yahoo! Personals, is rumored to be working on a secret startup project and has lots to teach all of us about the social media space.

Xeni Jardin writes for weird-hunting blog BoingBoing and publishes media all around the world and web.

Lorelle VanFossen writes Lorelle on Wordpress, a leading source of education about using WordPress and about blogging in general.

Photo: Susan Mernit, by Brian Solis

Friends of ReadWriteWeb

Why stop at just our list? We asked a few other people to contribute. We hope you'll add your list of favorites in comments as well.

Matt Mullenweg is the creator of WordPress and another fan of Lorelle on Wordpress. He also named three other bloggers that were new to our list.

Kathy Sierra teaches people about usability and design. More than a year after a gender-based campaign of harassment led her to stop posting to her blog, Sierra remains a public speaker in high demand and one of many peoples' favorite bloggers.

danah boyd is an academic researching the culture of youth on social networks. If you've ever got some free time and want just one blog to read - hers is a good choice.

Tara Hunt is a marketing consultant and author. She blogs at Horse Pig Cow about how businesses can thrive in the changing online world.

Holly Ross

Holly Ross is the Executive Director of the Nonprofit Technology Network, NTEN. Her must-reads include:

Nancy Schwartz's Getting Attention, all about new media marketing for nonprofit organizations.

Michelle Martin's Bamboo Project is a blog about personal and proffesional development for knowledge workers.

Charlene Li is an outbound analyst at Forrester and co-author of Groundswell, a book and a blog about how big business can transform itself to engage in the social web.

Beth Kanter is a nonprofit tech consultant who has worked with nonprofit arts and community-based organizations for over twenty-five years. Words can't describe Beth's awesomeness.

Mike Linksvayer

Mike Linksvayer is the CTO of Creative Commons, a global organization working to create alternatives to traditional copyright law. His favorite bloggers include:

Wendy Seltzer is a technology law blogger who writes about Intellectual Property Rights.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at Reason magazine and a blogger.

Michelle Thorne is a thinker, about free culture and a whole lot more.

Carolina Botero is a Colombian blogger who writes in Spanish about Free Culture and technology.

Curt Hopkins

Curt Hopkins is the founding editor of The Committee to Protect Bloggers, a blog and organization dedicated to protecting bloggers around the world from imprisonment, censorship and other offenses at the hand of authoritarian governments. Curt didn't hesitate for a moment before pointing us toward the following bloggers.

Esra'a Al Shafei is a 21 year old blogger from the Kingdom of Bahrain. She writes at Mideast Youth and at FreeKareem.org, a blog dedicated to agitating for the freedom of imprisoned Egyptian blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman.

Israel-Canadian freelance writer Lisa Goldman writes about Israel and media.

Sokari Ekine is the founder of Black Looks, a blog about Africa, women in Africa and a whole host of other topics.

Who Are Your Favorites?

The blogs above are just a few of the many that are written by women leading public discussions about technology and many other topics online. Now that it's time for this year's Blogher conference, we'd love to take the opportunity to discover more excellent women who blogs. Who are your favorites?

The Tech Angle

Built on the open source social news site software Pligg, Sk*rt has quickly taken a leadership position in the cutting edge market it exists in. Ad and blog network giant Sugar Publishing, for example, has been unable to unseat Sk*rt with its rival site SugarLoving. Sk*rt is gaining increasing Silicon Valley attention of late and could very well become the subject of some business news soon.

The site combines user submissions with voting and a Propeller-like editors' selected stories column. Its vote ranking algorithm is presumably much less developed than Digg's (age of site and Pligg, am I wrong?) but the site does offer some features Digg doesn't, like a handy bookmarklet for submitting stories from off-site.

Community

The most important feature, of course, is the woman-centric community. Digg is de facto male-centric enough to be generally inhospitable and comments on some gender-related stories there are so horrifying that no one could be blamed for never returning to the site again after reading them.

Community-specific news sites for anyone outside of the dominant demographic groups or mainstream interests are likely to see substantial growth as the underlying technology becomes less exotic to non-early adopters.

The List

Enough about the old site, though. Here are the 10 names that users are choosing between for the new Sk*rt. Which one is your favorite? Mine's the sixth on this list. Voting ends Friday night at midnight, presumably PST. You can vote on the company blog.

Name: Jupe Domain Name: jupejupe.com or jupeit.com, we can’t decide.

Name: Lemonade (As in when life hands you lemons…)
Domain Name: Lemona.de (Kinda weird because it doesn’t even need a .com, but that’s also why we like it.)

Name: Kirtsy
Domain Name: kirtsy.com

Name: Phlox
Domain Name: phlox.com

Name: Mesosoup
Domain Name: mesosoup.com

Name: SheSaw
Domain Name: shesaw.com

Name: Fierst
Domain Name: fierst.com

Name: GabOHla
Domain Name: gabohla.com

Name:19rocks (The 19th amendment rocks.) Actually this can be 19 anything. Ideas?
Domain Name: 19rocks.com

Name: HolyMoses
Domain Name: holymos.es