The Thinking Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Fridays, covering the ideas The Mechanism is thinking and talking about with our peers and clients.

• We've been spending a lot of time talking about LinkedIn and it's place in the social media universe. This week they made public a platform that should bring LinkedIn content, buttons, Twitter-esque "profile summaries" and more to websites throughout the Web.

• Yesterday Facebook launched the Open Compute Project, making public the specifications and design documents that went into creating their customized servers and datacenters. Ars Technica explains why they did it.

• Will Google's +1 beat Facebook's Like?

• And speaking of Google, Larry Page wasted no time as returning CEO, implementing a major reorganization of the company.

• All this talk of social media reminds us of a report from last summer. Neuroeconomist Paul Zak has discovered that social networking triggers the release of the generosity-trust chemical in our brains. In other words, using the LinkedIn, Like and +1 buttons affects the brain like falling in love.