"The simple fact is that we need to start equipping buyers with their own tools for connecting with sellers, and for engaging in respectful and productive ways. That is, to improve the ability of demand to drive supply, and not to constantly goose up supply to drive demand, and failing 99.x% of the time."

"The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain. The technology will continue to exist and improve. It looks like you’ll be able to run your own web server on your own domain for the foreseeable future. But all the things that matter will be controlled and owned by a very small number of Big Web companies. Your identity will be your accounts at Facebook, Google and Twitter, not the domain name you own. You don’t pay Big Web a single penny so it can take away your identity and all your data at any time. The things you can say and do that are likely to be seen and used by any significant number of people will be the things that Facebook, Google and Twitter are happy for you to say and do. You can do what you like on your own website but you’ll probably be shouting into the void."

"Obviously, the Epiphinator will need to slim down in order to thrive, but a careful study of history shows how impossible it is to determine whether it can return to both power and glory, or whether its demise is imminent."

"Just as fast fashion seeks to pressure shoppers with the urgency of now or never, social media hope to convince us that we always have something new and important to say -- as long as we say it right away. And they are designed to make us feel anxious and left out if we don’t say it, as their interfaces favor the users who update frequently and tend to make less engaged users disappear."

"When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears. It reminds me that those of us who turn in disgust from what we consider an overinflated liberal-bourgeois sense of self should be careful what we wish for: our denuded networked selves don’t look more free, they just look more owned."

"As social media become more embedded in everyday society, the mismatch between the rule-based privacy that software offers and the subtler, intuitive ways that humans understand the concept will increasingly cause cultural collisions and social slips. But people will not abandon social media, nor will privacy disappear. They will simply work harder to carve out a space for privacy as they understand it and to maintain control, whether by using pseudonyms or speaking in code."

"Jockey Maylan Studart doesn't have an agent, so instead she used Facebook to help pick up her first career win at Saratoga Race Course."

Intimacy and death in the age of social media. (Also, gorgeous writing by Bolick. "It was a brave little house with a big, tumbledown barn and fields that sloped into forests beyond. The days were bright with snow, the nights forbiddingly dark.")

Yes! I've experienced the same. "Reading that line, I instantly felt Leo’s pain. When I was researching my most recent book – which mainly focuses on the events of the past three years of my life ... to remind myself of details and events that may have been missing from my more traditional notes. What I found – or rather didn’t find – shocked me. Throughout my earlier archives, I was able to find lengthy, sometimes surprisingly personal, posts – recounting the highs and lows of starting companies, making and losing friends, leaving London, beginning to travel around America and Europe… and countless other published episodes that backed up, and enhanced the contents of my private notebooks. But then, as I clicked forward through the archives to more recent years, something odd happened. At a certain point, the number of posts in each monthly archive dropped off a cliff, particularly where details of my personal life were concerned."

"Over the next twelve months, the media industry is likely to be split between those who master the Facebook system and those who don’t. A decade or so ago, for a print publication, going on the internet was seen as the best way to rejuvenate its audience; today, as web news audiences reach a plateau, Facebook is viewed as the most potent traffic booster."

Danah Boyd's SXSW keynote. Contextual integrity, control essential to users. "Just because something is publicly accessible does not mean that people want it to be publicized."

Handy quick comparison.

"Yes, Facebook is becoming the web for millions and millions of people. As I have written before, there's already a wealth of amazing things you can do within the site without ever leaving. What's more, as I also speculated, the site giving rise to headless media companies like Zynga that don't need a web site to succeed. In short, I believe Facebook is unstoppable. They aren't just the next Google. They're the next web."

"... the latest moves in an ambitious campaign to make the social graph an integral, ubiquitous element of life online."