Behind the scenes at Facebook
6/4/2010"...as human beings we are capable of making sense of situations based on the thinnest slice of experience."
— Malcolm Gladwell, author of Blink and The Tipping Point.
IT'S EVERYWHERE: The ubiquity of Facebook is undeniable and it occupies an increasingly all-encompassing place in our culture. It's the ultimate social networking site -- at least for now -- and it's free. It seems like everyone under 40 is on Facebook and at the same time its very existence seems to deeply offend certain people. Perhaps they're bothered by the fact that it is so popular. Or maybe it's the inherent banality in so many of the posts. Whatever the case, a new book about Facebook sheds light on its founders and how it really works. Here's a review. RL
HE'S SAFE: If you haven't heard already, umpire Jim Joyce made a colossal bad call in the Tigers versus Indians game Tuesday night that cost former Mud Hen Armando Gallaragga a perfect game. Oh, man, this is a bad one. At Thin Slices we think there's an obvious solution to this sort of thing, which is technology. It's 2010 so why not introduce replay into baseball and if an ump gets something wrong, it's overturned? Isn't it far more important to get the call right than to live with mistakes that could be easily fixed by accepting that we live in an era when that doesn't happen? Kudos to the ump, Jim Joyce, a Toledo native, for manning up after the game and taking responsibility for the call. RL
WATCH YOUR STEP: A Utah woman is suing Google maps for $100,000 because the Web site gave her walking directions that put her on a busy highway. The result? She was hit by a car and now says it's all Google's fault for telling her the wrong way to walk. RL
FINALLY!!!!!: This three-minute description of Lost, complete with Post-It notes goes a long way toward explaining the popular television show and is more clear than just about anything we saw in mainstream papers. It actually makes it seem interesting. RL
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