Rose Cantine

A few days ago I broke down and bought Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, and the new Airport Extreme 802.11n base station. I’ve been thinking about upgrading for several months but reports of problems experienced by other users who upgraded, scared me into sitting on the sidelines. I have been fortunate in that I [...]

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 [...]

The Fawlty Towers of Retail — CompUSA — is closing all of their stores after the holidays. A few months ago I complained that CompUSA treated its customers like thieves (click here to read my post CompUSA: where every customer is a thief). It’s hard to imagine how you run a business like this unless [...]

Stats: iPhone has 0.09 percent of Web usage — yes, that’s a lot: In this post Valleywag points out that iPhone users tend to use the Web more than non-iPhone users. Excerpt:
Windows CE, which encompasses every Windows Mobile device shipped, holds a 0.06 percent share; Danger Research’s Sidekick product family holds a tiny 0.02 percent [...]

Cory Doctorow has written an excellent piece about how Facebook suffers from exactly the same dilemma suffered by earlier online social networks: when everyone’s on, it’s not cool anymore. And worse — you’ll need to “defriend” people. Oh how to do this without offending people? You can’t. Here’s an excerpt from Cory’s article:
You’d think that [...]

Here is a screenshot of my Facebook newsfeed dated 10 November 2007. Pay attention to the California Car Insurance sponsored ad in my feed. Is this all Facebook can do - insert stupid irrelevant sponsored ads about California car insurance to a person who lives in Amsterdam?
Facebook is purportedly worth $15 billion. If my company [...]

Farhad Manjoo, Salon’s tech columnist, did quite a bit of research and showed that Macs are indeed cheaper than PCs. Moreover, their eBay resale value is higher:
Even for computers, brand matters. This week I compared prices of several machines from Dell, Gateway and other PC vendors against Apple’s lineup of Macs. In most cases comparable [...]