One of the hardest things about being a writer/consultant in digital with some -- ahem -- experience, is that when new social platforms emerge, you want to go play on them, but there's no one you know who wants to play on them too. It's strange. You read about these platforms, write about them and analyze them all day long, but ultimately, you begin to feel like someone who is in the cable TV industry who doesn't have cable. Only in social, it's much harder than calling up your local cable provider and signing on. You can join all of …

If you've got Facebook, who needs the NSA? That's the question I've been asking myself after reading yesterday about Facebook's new, um, eavesdropping service, which uses the sounds of music and TV shows around you to help you share what you're listening to or watching. Please note that in the very same week -- nay, on the very next day -- Facebook also said it was going to push all of its nearly 1.3 billion users to do a perhaps annual privacy check to make sure that everyone's privacy settings are really where they want them to be.

For a moment, let's not focus on the delicious irony of Buzzfeed breaking the second biggest news about The New York Times this week. The site -- which many a Times staffer probably sniffs derisively at -- uploaded the paper-of-record's entire 91-page "Innovation Report" that calls for de-emphasizing print in favor of a more sophisticated approach to digital. If you're in digital, it's even more intriguing than the news on Wednesday that executive editor Jill Abramson had been unceremoniously shown the door.

Apparently, from what I've been seeing all around, it's time to go hating on Twitter, which means it's time for the Social Media Insider to find out why people are hating on Twitter, other than the usual restlessness that typifies most heavy social media users.

At the risk of going entirely off-script, today I'm going to write about the NewFronts, maybe just because everyone else is - and if anything characterizes the Social Media Insider, it's a vicious insistence on being on top of the latest trends. But the good news is that when it comes to social media's role in the broader media business, there is no going off-script. If the one NewFront presentation I went to is any guide, much of the success of the entire digital video enterprise relies on social -- maybe (in a sense) even more than it relies on …