“People just love to look at pictures…That’s the killer app of all online social networks.”

Above are the words of Mikolaj Jan Piskorski, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, who has spent years studying the behavior of people on online social networks. His research is full of information on how the separate genders spend their time online, the seduction of Twitter, and the futility of MySpace, but aside from the aforementioned quotation, my favorite insight was the following, for its simplicity: “Online social networks are most useful when they address real failures in the operation of offline networks.”

-Elise