We think Facebook gives a pretty good reflection of what’s going on in the hearts, minds, and conference rooms of America’s people and companies, let alone the world’s. We follow along, too, personally and professionally. Here’s what we found this week that’s informative and also more than a little entertaining.

1. Facebook is developing an “unsubscribe” link that would allow users to comment and “Like” their friends’ posts without all the noisy email alerts that come every time someone else comments later. That sounds like something worth commenting on and liking.
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2. Businesses are apparently not all that dissimilar from middle-school students and their desire for popularity. With the growing importance of a healthy Facebook presence, companies can now turn to buying friends, rather than earning them. And with that comes the risk of buying fake friends – and we don’t mean friends who will backstab you, but those who simply don’t exist at all. Here at Stone, we’re fairly certain that we’d rather have a smaller number of living, breathing friends than a whole lot of specters. The word-of-mouth value simply isn’t there.
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3. Las Vegas’s Golden Nugget Casino hopes to score a jackpot with the launch of its own branded Facebook game. Like other popular Facebook games, such as Farmville, users earn points (or play money, in this case) to use toward building out their worlds, in this case a casino. Real and system-created Facebook friends visit and spend their play money in users’ casinos, which just earns the casino owner more to spend on improvements. Users, in turn, can take their money to use on gambling in friends’ casinos, too. We predict an increase in the number of news feed posts from friends asking for help in acquiring a slot machine, but also in overall brand awareness for the Golden Nugget.
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4. Is this man having his 15 minutes of Facebook fame? Apparently all it took for Steven Slater to become a Facebook hero to 20,000 fans and counting was to respond to rudeness with more rudeness. Slater, the JetBlue flight attendant who got into a cursing match with a passenger on a plane, walked off the job (grabbing a couple of beers on the way). Thousands of fans have offered him congratulatory messages, shared their own bad-job horror stories, and some have even contributed to his defense fund. It does beg the question how likely a future employer may feel about hiring a man who posts “If you can dream it you can do it!” with regards to acts of on-the-job shenanigans.