Online Conversation Quotes

Twitter is a global town square.

Trending topics helped make Twitter a more relevant metric of what the world was talking about at any given moment. Google has worked for years in the space, most notably with Google Trends and Hot Searches, but Google+ offers the search giant the ability to see what is truly trending in real time.

The social-media discourse is very different from what it might be on the ground. It's easy to bloviate without having to look anyone in the eye and then having those sentiments swell and amplify and go viral.

Twitter is the perfect complement to television. TV has always been social. You talk to the person you're sitting next to on the couch. You talk to the people you're - you know, at work with the next day around the proverbial water cooler.

I love how I can see [on Twitter] some of the thoughts and ideas of my favorite cultural figures and still also chatter with my friends and family. It's a cocktail party with a fraction of the awkwardness of an actual cocktail party.

I always find something interesting on Twitter that leads me somewhere else.

I don't think of Twitter as a social network. I think of it as a messaging system that has a lot of social components to it.

I do like Twitter. Writing is a solitary pursuit, and it can get lonely. I like to go into Twitter for a short period of time, communicate with clever friends, and then switch it off. That's perfect for me.

The Internet is really our meeting place. We have this amazing listserv. Every time I log onto it I feel a sense of pride, because if you log on and say, "Oh I was just in San Diego and I was in a park and I saw a lion," the flurry of replies on average is just like--wow! All these existential questions about what it means to be an African, and never having seen a lion at home, but having seen a lion here. Everything you say turns into this real philosophical debate--it's incredible in so many ways. And it's an invigorating place to be.

The first conversation I ever had about the Internet was in 1993 with Robert Wright, who was then a colleague at the 'New Republic.'

I believe the term "blog" means more than an online journal. I believe a blog is a conversation. People go to blogs to read AND write, not just consume.

Being on Twitter, live tweeting some of the episodes, I get direct feedback from people.

I've never really been into doing a lot of social media, but it's a great way for people to talk amongst themselves on a large platform and to have a large conversation with people who also enjoy the same thing.

There are 500 million people on Facebook, but what are they saying to each other? Not much.

We judge on the basis of what somebody looks like, skin color, whether we think they're beautiful or not. That space on the Internet allows you to converse with somebody with none of those things involved.

Twitter is like overhearing people's conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

Twitter. It's not a good sound, is it? If it were worth doing, there would be a better word for it.

Twitter is my bar. I sit at the counter and listen to the conversations, starting others, feeling the atmosphere.

My favorite topical tweets are the ones that put a tweet in context so it illuminates a deeper truth or societal trend.

Twitter is basically just writing a bunch of one-liners - it's a short form or whatever.

Facebook has focused on the conversation, but not really on absorbing the Web into its walled garden.

I can remember on the first day on 'Chatroom,' it was just one scene for the whole day, which was a really nice luxury to have.

Twitter is very impulsive and impermanent and you only have 140 characters. There is no greater 'Emperor' of Twitter than Stephen Fry.

I mentioned Ellen Page on Twitter in a tweet. It was like, "I met Ellen Page last night and she's so beautiful and lovely!" So then we started talking.

If you're trying to write about what the Chinese people are talking about, you can sometimes get a distorted picture if you go online and look at the conversation on social media.