Until Facebook supported asymmetric relationships, it was a bit of a problem,
I had like 1,000 people a day from the Philippines wanting to be my friend. I couldn't say 'no' quickly enough; I love everybody in the the Philippines, but I thought it'd be strange if I had all those 13-year-old girls signed up as my friend. Facebook wasn't working for me, and then they came up with a different format, where you can have 'fans' so it's asymmetric. So that was a big help. And then I wanted to have a demarcation between what I had done when I was at Microsoft and what I was doing outside of Microsoft. I do one thing which is fairly low tech, I do a letter that's distributed every year over the web. We've done a lot of videos on the web that have been successful
Is Twitter mostly about random things:
'I'm getting into my car, parking my car, the light is red?' Is it about that or about more serious things? We decided last fall: okay, even though it's been used a lot for more celebrity oriented local interest type things, a few people were starting to use it for very serious topics, to stay engaged and know what's going on. The format we have now [is] essentially: we have a blog, we're doing experiments with this audio/video thing I do after every trip, we're doing some Q&A things, we use the Twitter stuff to drive traffic not just to us but to other things I see like
[this recent NYT piece by U2's Bono]. It's working super well. We basically got started about a year after I left Microsoft, and social media had evolved quite a bit.