Rose Cantine

Danah Boyd has an excellent post on why efficiency and reliability are not necessarily good things in a social networking application:
Social technologies that make things more efficient reduce the cost of action. Yet, that cost is often an important signal. We want communication to cost something because that cost signals that we value the other [...]

Microsoft launched a unified communications platform (merging email, instant messaging and telephony) that Business Division President Jeff Raikes claims will put an end to telephone tag:
“The era of dialing blind, the era of playing phone tag, the era of voice-mail jam…that era is ending . . . I don’t want to get in touch [...]

Ever since I’ve been using Microsoft Office, first on a PC and since 2002 on a Mac, I’ve bought every single upgrade from Microsoft. Not this time. Microsoft is selling the upgrade for $239.95.
Here are the reasons why I won’t be upgrading:

$239.95 is too much money to pay for - what? I use Word, Excel [...]

I don’t know whether to call Pudding Media the most loathesome business model in the world or the most cynical, or both. Pudding Media is the latest company to take advantage of the “free services in exchange for ads” business model. We’ve seen free Wi-Fi in exchange for viewing ads (MetroFi) and free mobile phone [...]

Stylefeeder.com is the latest personal online shopping site that allows you to bookmark items you like (an iPhone, Gucci shoes, Dior bag), find “style twins” (people who share your taste), get product recommendations specific to your taste and solicit advice from others in the community about items you are thinking of buying. It’s a social [...]

I love Wordpress, the software behind this blog and Rosecantine. It’s easy to use, fun and versatile. And there’s a huge community of developers writing widgets and plugins, and creating beautiful templates for it. Mashable posted a list of more than 300 Wordpress tools so if you have not yet bookmarked that page, do so [...]

Skype has been down for 24 hours. There is an alternative to Skype. It’s called Gizmo Project. It allows the same free calls to other users of Gizmo (and other VOIP networks and devices that use SIP). You can also make very inexpensive calls to landline and mobile phones, and get a phone number in [...]