Those of you with an interest in politics and 50 minutes of spare time might want to investigate the latest largely pointless use of technology. 

“President Obama sat down for a discussion with a group of Americans from across the country in a Google+ Hangout,” says the White House blog. “It was the first online conversation to happen at the White House in real time – ever.” 

As democracy in action, it proved to be a complicated way to ask the president exactly the questions that he’s asked every time someone asks him questions. On the other hand, historians will mark this as an important moment in politics: the first step towards the inevitable election of President Google in 2020.

Reader Ian Thompson has found some excellent advice for SMB owners this week from HP, “How to stop working and go home”.

The advice runs to 837 words, which might suggest that one of the things keeping you at work is reading overlong articles on the interweb. Ian has also found some other gems of insight from HP, including “6 tips to get your Facebook posts seen in newsfeeds”, which he suggests could be shortened to “Sign up to Facebook” and “Add some friends”. If all this is too technical, his final recommendation (“Break out the crayons” he advises) is HP’s advice on “How to Organize Your Inbox with Color”.

Does anyone else need HP’s business advice – tying shoes, using a fork, how to know if you’re sexually harassing an event hostess – that sort of thing? You suggest it to us, we’ll suggest it to them.

We bring the urgent news that Cerqueira Anderson and Janet Santos from Sao Paulo have set a new record for social media-inspired stupidity by calling their son “Facebookson”.

The Brazilian press reports that the couple met through Facebook and wanted to commemorate the location that led to Janet’s pregnancy. Might we see a sudden rise in the popularity of the name “Pitcher & Piano” in the UK, for the same reason? It’ll be equally classy and distinctively British.

We continue our occasional series on “Using social media to find out things we could have told you for a fiver” with a paper from the journal Science, in which researchers from Cornell University have been using Twitter to monitor the attitudes of 2.4 million people in 84 countries.

The conclusion, after two years of research, is that we wake up happy, and become less happy during the working day. This might be the long-sought confirmation of the existence of affective rhythms that dominate our state of mind. It might be that work is depressing, most of the time.

Or it might be that this sample became grouchy when they saw the volume of crap their friends were posting on Twitter every day.

Further evidence that the mere presence of smartphones encourages researchers to investigate the bleeding obvious comes in the shape of a study from Aalto University in Finland on what are now known as “checking behaviours”, which is what scientists call “checking”.

Apparently, having a smartphone encourages people to check their email, news and social media apps more often, which might not be a total surprise. This result was compiled using real science, but you can simulate it by attempting to walk quickly down a busy street and counting the number of people you nearly bump into because they’re busy telling someone on Facebook that they’re walking down the street.