You take a picture of yourself in some exceptional situation - skydiving or whatever. People always post those photos because it works - you're saying something about yourself that begs a conversation and that's what the users are there for.

Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they're demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we're changing. All we have to do is look.

Even at the person-to-person level, to be universally liked is to be relatively ignored. To be disliked by some is to be loved all the more by others. And, specifically, a woman’s overall sex appeal is enhanced when some men find her ugly.

Text is, in some ways, on the way out, unfortunately. There are dating sites now that are just pictures.

We noticed recently that people didn't like it when Facebook "experimented" with their news feed. Even the FTC is getting involved. But guess what, everybody: if you use the Internet, you're the subject of hundreds of experiments at any given time, on every site. That's how websites work.

People tend to prefer their own race online in terms of the volume of messages.

There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.