Creepy - but not surprising.

LOL - are you sure you don't work on Dragon's Den?

That reminds me of the proverb "He who knows not and knows not that he knows not...", time to teach the young crowd the old school thinking?

Alas, old school thinking got us to where we are today! There is a useful flip side to ignorance, though, that Clay Shirky explained wonderfully in the Bayesian advantage of youth. Sometimes - not often, but frequently enough to matter - it is useful not to be an expert because sometimes - not often - experts are wrong too. A tricky balance.

How many times has someone accomplished the impossible because they didn't know it was impossible?

"Infographics are seductive things, making poorly researched weakly linked randomly chosen events culled from Wikipedia look like a believable story."

You shouldn't hold back like that Jon. What do you really think?

My bigggest complaint about Facebook is that there is no thumbs down. Actually, if you think about this for a bit, it's bad, since you should be able to like or dislike something.

Facbook reminds me of a vacuum cleaner that sucks you in and gets you addicted to it!

The vacuum cleaner metaphor is quite apt, thanks Alvin! I'd go more with Toxoplasma Gondii, that scary parasite transmitted via cats that makes mice lose their fear of cats. Or maybe cigarettes: there is no great pleasure apart from the cessation of the pain of addiction.

Thumbs downs are a big no-no if you want to acquire as many network connections as possible - if your business model is based on connecting people at any cost, you don't want to make it too easy for them to send a negative message to one another, especially as you want to build it in such a way that unfriending is socially unacceptable. A thumbs-up is a gift that is good for social capital and so sustains the connections that drive Facebook's business. A thumbs-down is a critique not just of the post but of the person: bad business. That's one of the biggest differences between social nets and what Terry Anderson and I call social sets where content matters more than the people providing it. Thumbs-downs are brilliant for helping to sort out wheat from chaff in a set, as long as the poster doesn't know the critic, or if it is part of the game rules that everyone accepts in exchange for getting good content or to remain a member of something inherently valuable for other than social reasons. I think Reddit is mostly more set-like than net-like. A big downside of sets, where most interactions are anonymous or pseudo-anonymous, is that there are few of the checks and safeguards that limit bad behaviour in networks or organized groups, so those thumbs-downs become extremely important as a means of bottom-up control of the excesses. It's a very tricky balancing act to get it right, which Reddit seems to be having trouble with at the moment.