Back in in 1999, just as Ebay was coming into bloom , William Gibson wrote a piece on his experiences buying expensive watches online. He called the article My Obsession and it details his youth as a picker in the 1970s. He writes: When I was a young man, traversing the ’70s in whatever post-hippie, pre-slacker mode I could manage, I made a substantial part of my living, such as it was, in a myriad of minuscule supply-and-demand gaps that have now largely closed

This is a guest post by Roger Warner of Content and Motion . Here’s classic example of how badly some companies are screwing up on social media

So it’s IPO time for the leading social commerce platform on the planet, and Facebook thinks it’s worth half of Google ($104bn vs $196bn), as much as Amazon ($101bn), and twice eBay ($52bn).

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from TechCrunch Disrupt winner and Getaround co-founder Jessica Scorpio on her experiences at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt New York.

If anybody knows how to talk back to Facebook , it’s Jim Steyer , the founder and CEO of Common Sense Media , America’s largest and most powerful advocacy group for kids.

A new breed of social media sites led by visual rather than text-based interactions is now spawning a new breed of marketing service catering to the new format. The latest of these is a startup called Curalate , which is officially launching today with $750,000 in seed funding from NEA , First Round Capital and UPenn-focused MentorTech for a service that lets brands search and track its images across the social network, whether they have been posted by the brands themselves or by everyday consumers. Although the site is only officially launching today, in its beta format it has already managed to pick up more than 150 brands as customers, its co-founder and CEO, Apu Gupta, tells me

Somebody is going to take a look at this video and make millions.

A lot of you have come to depend on TechCrunch for your startup funding news — and hey, we’re happy to be the first place you come when you’re looking to see who’s raising money.

What does it mean when Facebook says it has 901 million monthly active users on its network? According to figures out from the International Telecommunication Union, it effectively signifies that Facebook is the world’s largest social network by a very long shot. The ITU says in a new report that that the number of people using all social media services have passed the 1 billion mark.

Editor’s note: Dan Greenberg is the founder & CEO of Sharethrough , the native video advertising company. Dan has been honored as an AdAge “Media Maven” and was recently named to the Forbes “30 under 30″ list. You can find him on Twitter at @dgreenberg