ReadWriteWeb

Have you ever found yourself ignoring the directions of your car's GPS in order to get somewhere faster or more efficiently than it can calculate? Me too. Chances are when leaving point A, you plugged in the address of point B, and a route was calculated on how to get from one to the other. The problem is, things come up on the route from point A to point B that may cause you to divert from your path such as construction, road closures, traffic, side trips you need to make or neighborhoods you may choose to avoid driving straight through.

It's human nature - we are wired to be averse to change. When something new comes into our lives, we inherently approach it with caution, and at times, with negativity and hostility; but if that change is fundamentally good and right, it will gradually become widely accepted. For startups, especially those in the early stages of existence, changes come frequently and now and then in large chunks, which can be jarring for users who may have just become accustomed to the previous version of a product.

Individuals often have to sacrifice their livelihood for a cause. It's not fair, but it happens. But what happens when they're forced to volunteer at a corporate job? This morning CNBC and Web Guild published articles on how some individuals are "volunteering" to defer pay to maintain their positions or fill time between job interviews.

As "volunteering" is defined as "working on behalf of others without being motivated by financial or material gain," this seems like a strange use of the word. In the case of employees deferring pay, this seems more like an unfortunate burden rather than an act of volunteerism. If you're an experienced professional looking to stay sharp and you've got the freedom to contribute to actual volunteer-driven efforts or you'd like to try working for a cause-based organization, below are some great resources:

When Facebook updated its users' homepages last week, we already wondered how users would react to these changes. After all, when Facebook introduced the news feed in 2006, its users were anything but happy about this change. Now, a new application is quickly spreading on Facebook that allows users to vote on the new design. This application is not endorsed by Facebook, but the current vote totals are quite interesting: 43,000 users liked the new layout, while almost 700,000 users said that they did not like it.