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

I know that shorter messages are better in terms of reply rate. The optimal length is something like 50 characters. Characters, not words.

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

A great piece of advice for online dating is to stand out from the crowd. So greetings like "hello" and "hi" are very common. They do less well than things that are a little bit quirky or a little bit weird, like "howdy" or "holla." The rarer your salutation, the better it does, in general.

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.

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.

Because the way love works in general, you don't need everybody to like you somewhat - you need one person to like you a lot.