Rose Cantine

Think all those Facebook widgets are so cool? Watch out for this one which installs the Zango adware / spyware, says Fortinet:
Fortinet Global Security Research Team discovered a malicious Facebook Widget (officially, a “Platform Application”) actively spreading on the social networking site which ultimately prompts users to install the infamous “Zango” adware/spyware.
Click here [...]

Since everyone is making a list at the end of the year, I decided to create one, too. Here’s my top 10 most useful applications — things I couldn’t live without in 2007. Some are online apps, others are software that you download to your computer. I have a Mac Book Pro running Leopard (Mac [...]

Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo (the human-powered search engine) gave one of the best presentations at the Le Web 3.0 conference in Paris which took place from December 11-12, 2007. Jason’s presentation was entitled “Internet Pollution and How to Stop It”. He points out that much of the content on the Internet is spam and [...]

Not a day goes by without some kind of revelation about what’s being done with our user-generated content and our personal information on social networking sites and blog networks. The scandal around Facebook’s Beacon project, whose aim is to track and broadcast what Facebook users are doing on the Web, forced Facebook to back down.
In [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]