Human Psychology

Lessons from Human Psychology

1. The first lesson  is about the extraordinary power of flattery.  Everyone loves a dollop of flattering although some like it unknowingly. So to be successful use this power of flattery. But be genuine and sincere, there will be something about people that you can appreciate/compliment. Its proven that even if the person knows that he is being flattered he cannot help but enjoy the feeling.(Although it does not have the same impact as a genuine complement)
2. Your mind has a mind of its own:-) It takes considerable practice to tame your mind. If you can channel your thoughts, then thats the first step towards mastery of self.
3. We all generally want to be nice to to other people and liked by other people. 
4. We dont like to say "no" many times. This is why the "Door-in-the-face" sales technique works! (more details here  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique)
5. We all crave for attention from the day we are born- babies crying when hungry, toddlers breaking stuff, teenagers acting wild,women spending time to get ready, men spending more time building their physique and/or moustaches/beards.

Why I like faceook?

To begin with, let me confess that i don't use Facebook as often as I should. I am one of those who believes in  meeting people face to face rather than clicking on "Like"or "Check-in".
However Facebook connects me to so many long lost friends who would have been otherwise untraceable or unreachable. This is good enough reason for me to "Hangout" on Facebook (Pun intended on Google).
Also its much easier to keep in touch with latest updates from Friends without having to travel huge distances or taking exclusive time off to connect.

But these are not the main reasons for me to like Facebook, I like Facebook for the technology under its hood and the scale of its operations. And for the fact that this company is driven/run by techies at its core which explains the technological innovation and also the ethos behind it drive to adopt/contribute to the open source community.  I particularly like the fact that it faces the scale/technology challenges head-on and  that this is done through open source software. Although because of this scale/rapid innovation there are other issues around security, business model etc which is topic for another post.

The article below takes a peek at the software behind Facebook. Hop on aboard and enjoy the ride:
http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/06/18/the-software-behind-facebook/

Cheers,
Guru