What Makes Facebook Tick?

It's Thursday morning in the Calgary airport and I am about to board AC144 for my 35th flight of 2008 - which partly explains my absence from the blogosphere (the other part I'll explain later).

If you're a Facebook user, you won't be surprised to learn that Stanford is now offering a course called The Psychology of Facebook.

The course is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford.

He says: "When Facebook came along I was one of the developers at the launch and what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. This mass interpersonal persuasion."

Read the BBC report here