Image by Francis Chung, courtesy of Creative Commons licensing.
Happy Saturday y'all! Below, I have rounded up some things for you to think about this weekend:
1. Before he became a successful writer, a friend asked Hunter S. Thompson to give advice on how to find meaning and purpose in life. He responded with a must-read stellar letter that may make you question your own life's direction. Reader beware!
2. If you are a Facebook user, you may have noticed that the service has rolled out "Reactions", which allows users to have a wider emotional range of reactions to choose from other than just "liking" a post. Now you can choose to "love", "haha", "wow", "sad", and "angry" your friends' posts. This is in response to years of customer feedback requesting a "dislike" button. Although we didn't get a "dislike" button, now you can show sympathy for a friend going through a hard time or anger for a family member who got rear-ended on the highway. What's going to be really interesting, however, is how advertisers and marketers use Facebook's new "Reactions" for more targeted marketing. Make no mistake, this is really valuable data for marketers, and we can expect to see more specifically-targeted ads in the near future.
3. It turns out that the "Best Seller" badge on an Amazon book's page is fairly worthless. How worthless, exactly? Well, this article shows that it takes about $3 and five minutes for a book to be marked as a "Best Seller" on Amazon. Interestingly (albeit not surprisingly), Amazon removed the example book from the article after it was published.
That's all for this week's edition of Weekend Thoughts. Until next week, keep thinking wilder.