One. That’s the median number of tweets on twitter based on a sample of 300,000 twitter users. Should be expected given the power law distribution for users.

What makes up happy? An incredible study observing the lives of 268 Harvard men for over 72 years (including the likes of JFK) in a vain attempt to find out what makes us (men in this case) happy or successful. Amazing to see how such a study was kept alive for so long and begs the question why longitudinal studies like this don’t happen more often. Even though there doesn’t seem to have been anything conclusive from this study, it would be fascinating to see more data like this. They are amazing sources of cultural, political, psychological, social information. Granted the logistics of keeping such a study alive are complex, but it could provide eye-opening insights.

Collection of Y-Combinator toolbars: Firefox recently allowed for the creation of toolbar collections and looks like someone created a collection of FF toolbars by Y-Combinator funded companies. Youlicit is on the list and its nice to see people are still downloading it. One of these days I would love to write a blog post (or two) about our YC experience and Youlicit.

Inc. has a great article this month on PG & Y-Combinator. Really great to see that of the 145 companies invested in, there are 500 jobs (that’s an average of 3 jobs per investments! This is a stimulus package we can all use right now). I love the writers description of PG as it mirrors a lot of the same thoughts I had while at YC. Here are a few quotes from the article:

“I don’t mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.” – Fred Wilson

“I never cared about the official rules.” – PG

“Running a start-up is like being punched in the face repeatedly,” he says. “But working for a large company is like being waterboarded.” – PG

“”…you always come away feeling energized. You could be working on the most boring piece of software, and you talk to Paul and you think, Man, I’m excited to go back to work.” – Justin Kan. This is so true and happened to us a few times while we tried writing property management software for a brief period of time.