Bookmarking service Delicious has just rolled out a Google Chrome browser extension.

Like other Chrome extensions we love to play with, this one is lightweight, fast and useful. There’s no bulky sidebar here. Bookmarks can be created and saved with a miniscule “TAG” button and they can be searched from Chrome’s excellent omnibar. So, do you think this will prompt loyal Delicious users - many of whom had been holding out on Chrome in favor of Firefox - to switch to Google Chrome entirely?

Rebecca Zook is an online female math tutor who has been helping students get math into their brains for seven years. She blogs about learning at Triangle Suitcase.

Over half a million votes were cast to decide Barbie’s newest career. But even though Computer Engineer Barbie was developed in consultation with the Society of Women Engineer sand the National Academy of Engineering, the new doll’s appearance has sparked controversy.

While some have embraced coder Barbie, others have attacked the concept, saying that her pink laptop, sparkly leggings, and trendy glasses are “too feminine” to be realistic.

The critics imply that real coders aren’t feminine, and feminine coders aren’t real. But women shouldn’t feel like they have to stop being feminine to work in technology.

The First Computer Programmer Was a Fashionista

That’s right. The first coder was a lady. Ada Lovelace, over a century ahead of her time, is widely considered to be the first computer programmer. She was the first person to conceptualize and articulate what computers were capable of doing, and the first to foresee that computers could create artificial intelligence, generate graphics, and create music.

So, is Barbie’s outfit really that unrealistic? If the very first person to conceptualize a computer did so while wearing a girly up-do and a frilly gown, why can’t someone write great code while wearing pink platform crocs and a t-shirt that spells “BARBIE” in binary?

Women and Tech Today

This false dichotomy — that you have to choose between being feminine and “looking the part” of a mathematician or scientist — might be part of what turns girls off from math and science in the first place.

Or maybe girls don’t aim for careers in math and science because they don’t see role models. Even Ada Lovelace had role models. Her mom, the “Princess of Parallelograms,” loved math and gave Lovelace a very intensive math education. And Lovelace was also mentored by legendary female science writer and polymath Mary Somerville.

Or maybe girls are afraid of being the only woman in their technology courses or workplaces. If that’s the case, their concerns are certainly warranted. Not only are fewer women entering the information technology field, but more women are leaving the field mid-career.

A recent Harvard Business Review report, The Athena Factor, notes that “52% of highly qualified females working for SET [science, engineering, and technology] companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures.” These women report that they lack mentors and feel intense isolation in the workplace.

Coder Barbie and the Future

In 2010, maybe Computer Engineer Barbie would feel uncomfortable writing code on a pink laptop that matched her glasses in a workplace where she was outnumbered by men 25-to-1. But perhaps we should aspire to create a world where Computer Engineer Barbie and her gloriously pink accessories could realistically exist. Allowing a vision of an ultra-feminine computer engineer might, even subconsciously, open girls — and the rest of society — up to the possibility.

As a female math tutor, I used to feel the need to “tone down” my feminine style. I’d wear black slacks when working with my students for fear of appearing “unprofessional.” But then I decided to show my true fashion colors and wear my homemade dresses and sparkly barrettes when tutoring.

Since then, some kids have been openly relieved when they met me and found I didn’t look like their stereotype of a math tutor. The “math geek” stereotype in their brains was more intimidating and less fun than the real-life tutor wearing fuzzy pink boots.

You don’t have to choose between looking feminine and being good at math, science, and engineering. We need all kinds of people, all kinds of minds, and all kinds of geeks to solve our technology problems.

According to The New York Times, the social network will incorporate location in two ways: (1) its own features for sharing location and (2) APIs to let other apps — like Foursquare and Gowalla –- offer location services to Facebook users.

Presumably, Facebook will make sure to address privacy issues with its location features — for example, perhaps with settings that allow you to share your location only with a select group of friends. The Times’ report doesn’t detail the specifics of such features, though it notes that the social network updated its privacy policy late last year in preparation for a location launch.

Facebook will be rolling out its location features to an enormous user base — there are now more than 400 million users of the social network in total, 100 million of which access the site via mobile regularly. The company also has its own native apps for all of the major mobile platforms. All of this gives Facebook’s location features an enormous edge over the competition.

The Times’ report suggests that the competition isn’t the likes of Foursquare and Gowalla, however, but rather Google and its huge base of local small business advertisers. Of course, the startups aren’t ignoring this opportunity either — earlier today, Foursquare shared details of upcoming features it plans to release tohelp local businesses utilize checkin data.

With Facebook entering the space, though, the other players will need to look to create value in ways beyond checkins and knowing where your friends are located at any given point in time. That’s why Foursquare seems to be so focused on partnerships and gaming, while Gowalla is making moves (as recently as last night) in virtual goods.

In any event, location remains the huge trend so far in 2010, and literally each day seems to bring new indications of which way it will all play out.

In a blog post, Twitter writes that the protection works by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.”

How exactly they do that, we’re not sure, but Twitter notes that you’ll start seeing short links using its own “twt.tl” URL shortener in direct messages and email notifications. As users who have been victimized by phishing scams (and those annoyed by the constant barrage of dodgy DMs) can likely attest, it’s a feature whose time has most certainly come.

Last week A news was broken out that Google Apps Marketplace would launch today, reporting that it would be an app store integrated within Google Apps that would allow third-party developers to sell software directly to Google’s business consumers.

Now, with developers gathered at the Googleplex, we’re about to learn how Google Apps Marketplace works and, more importantly, which apps are going to be available at launch.

Some of the notes are given below:

Google Apps Marketplace: The Details

- Note: you can watch the live stream of Google Campfire One on the Google Developers YouTube Channel.

- Vic Gundotra, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, has just started speaking

- Vic is talking about feedback it’s received from its business customers. Google believes that business apps should be run in the cloud. One problem: to use multiple business apps, you need to log into multiple websites, which can be messy and a security threat.

- Google Apps Marketplace announced.

- Details: $100 flat fee, no matter the amount of apps you launch. 20% revenue share. This is an important number, as most app stores charge 30% revenue share, especially Apple’s iPhone app store.

- Over 50 partners for Google Apps, including Aviary, Expensify, Intuit, and others.

- Now Google is talking about the technical details of how to get your app added into the Google Apps interface.

- Google’s diving into secure data access via OAuth. Google’s clearly thought about how to make sure that information that apps need is received from users, but that apps don’t take more information than they need.

- Google has brought up a developer, Ryan, to demo some of the code to integrate his app with Google Apps Marketplace. It’s a “Hello World” type of app.

- If you go to http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/, you’ll see the store’s future splash page.

- Intuit is demoing. They’re the people behind Quickbooks and showing off their Intuit Online Payroll app within Google Apps.

- They’re showing of integrations of Intuit’s payroll system within Google Calendar. Logging in via Google Apps seems intuitive.

- New demo: Scott from Atlassin is demoing Jira Studio. The dashboard they’ve built with Google Apps integration is very impressive. Screenshots coming.

- “Fingertip access” to Google Talk. It has Google Docs integration, and is available today. It’s a very killer apps for development management and issue tracking.

- Another demo: Manymoon.

- The key themes seem to be A) how easy it is to code integration with Google Apps, and B) How many nifty things you can do linked to Google Apps. Google Calendar will definitely benefit from these apps.

- Everything will be available tonight for purchase

- Last demo of the night: Ryan from Appirio, a cloud solution provider. It’s a tool for managing your team’s cloud applications, such as Salesforce. It’s meant to transition enterprise into the cloud more effectively.

- One interesting demo: you can trigger actions within your email with Appirio. You can, for example, get information on customers right from within your email (it’s embedded!). The embeds are called Gmailcontextual gadgets, and they are really nifty.

- Example: Customers emails you saying that a project is behind schedule. With Appirio, you can access from Gmail the projects that are open with the customer vis PS Connect. It’ll show budget, the status of the project, end dates, and notes.

- Google’s David Glazer (Engineering Director) is closing the campfire session.

- The President of Google’s Enterprise division is on stage. Security, compatibility, simplicity, and more are possible through cloud apps, which is why Google has bet so heavily on it for enterprise.

- 25 million active users of Google Apps. And apparently once companies of 20,000+ employees switch to Google Apps, they don’t switch back.

Head to your Labs settings and enable the “Refresh POP accounts” lab, then hit “Save changes” at the bottom or top of the page. From then on, you’ll see a “Refresh” link to the right of your inbox buttons. Hit it and Gmail will poll any email accounts you’ve set it up to fetch from. Want to get started importing your other mail accounts into Gmail?

Now the company is offering an inexpensive software version of some of its features: the $30 PeeWee Kit includes seven age-appropriate childrens’ games, plus PC security and adult monitoring software, all on a U.S.B. drive. A CD-ROM version with four games will also be available for $20.

The security software protects children against malicious Web sites, takes screen shots, limits  time on the Web as well as the time spent gaming and using the PC in general, and allows the computer to be controlled remotely. The PC is also protected against changes to its operating system.

The PeeWee Kit, available this month, is compatible with Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

Here’s the official explanation of what happened: “Last week, Foursquare accidentally released to the App Store a new version of its app before it was totally ready. It was pulled shortly after, unfortunately, many users had already went through the update, and were left stuck with a non-functioning app.”

The version currently available is 1.6.1, but the folks at Foursquare say that the redesigned 1.7 update should appear in a few days.