To be universally liked is to be relatively ignored.

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.

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

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.

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.

Kind of paradoxically, men are very open minded or very even handed with their votes of women.

Going to a site with more users seems obviously better to me, but at the same time, having a bland, middle of the road profile with bland, middle of the road pictures seems like a bad strategy to me.

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.

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

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