The Incredible Discoveries of Ian J. Spector

Egypt’s Jamal Ibrahim has named his newborn daughter Facebook Jamal Ibrahim, a tribute to the central role the social network played in helping organize the demonstrations leading to Hosni Mubarak resigning from the presidency he’d held for 30 years.

“…The resulting data-dumps provide ample opportunity for musing about the Facebook phenomenon. The data group looked, for instance, at status updates that had triggered comments from readers or inspired them to hit the “Like” button, and it noted the word types most often used in such updates. People seem to “like” updates that include sexual words. Words related to death—not so much. No real surprise there. The team, however, also found that members with a lot of friends tend to use different types of words than members with fewer friends….”