How Facebook Can Become Bigger In Five Years Than Google Is Today

CloudFlare Wants To Be A CDN For The Masses (And Takes Five Minutes To Set Up) It’s no secret that performance can play a significant factor in a website’s success — keep your users waiting, and they’ll get impatient and head somewhere else. There are solutions available to help keep things speedy, like CDNs, but most smaller websites don’t use them. TechCrunch Disrupt finalist CloudFlare wants to bring these speedy load times to the masses, and it’s offering some other benefits too, including robust security protection against online threats. Prince says that speed issues can have a big impact on your site — one study showed that for every 100 milliseconds of time spent loading, you lose up to 2% of your visitors. Prince says that CloudFlare operates on the network level, so it supports any platform. CloudFlare will also be offering a ‘Pro’ plan, with added features like SSL, better page optimization, and object pre-fetching to further enhance speed gains. Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on CloudFlare:

New Data: Articles Published in the Morning Shared More on Facebook It’s been a while since I last published Facebook sharing data and I was waiting to gather a large enough sample set to produce this graph. I analyzed the average (interquartile mean to be specific) number of times articles were shared on Facebook based on the time of day they were published and I found that Facebook sharing seems to peak on articles that are posted in the morning, 9AM EST specifically. I’ve previously found that ReTweeting peaks a few hours later in the day so the takeaway here I think is to publish your articles in the morning and then Tweet about them later in the day. Another interesting data point here is the volume of stories posted at different hours. Notice the light gray bars at the bottom of the chart, they peak two hours after the “sharing peak”. If you’re curious about my methodology, read this.

Namesake Is The Match.com For Professional Opportunities We’ve written about Namesake, a stealthy startup founded by former MySpace execs Dan Gould and Brian Norgard, that aims to match opportunities with people in your network. Today, Namesake is launching its professional community at TechCrunch Disrupt. Namesake, which aims to create a better way to match and route opportunities that come across your desk everyday, is part LinkedIn, part Twitter, and part Facebook. Gould says that traditional search doesn’t work for professional match making opportunities, which is why Namesake can fill a gap in the market. Gould and Norgard sold their company Newroo to MySpace in 2006 and also founded Ad.ly, an in-stream advertising network for Facebook, Twitter and MySpace. Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on NameSake: CC: How do you compete with LinkedIn? DG: We are trying to blend the value that LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter provides in one platform. SV: How do you make money? KR: Who is this optimized for?

BREAKING: Putting Solar on the White House! Just in time to give the Global Work Party a White House-sized boost, the Obama administration announced this morning that they are going to put solar panels on the First Family's living quarters, returning to a tradition begun by president Jimmy Carter and abandoned by Ronald Reagan. It's a great win for your efforts over the last months–everyone who wrote letters, signed petitions, and turned out for the Solar Road Show as we rolled down the east coast from Unity College towing one of the Carter panels. We were disappointed that day that the White House wasn't prepared to go solar, but very happy that they took our suggestion to look into the matter seriously. Solar panels on one house, even this house, won't save the climate, of course. The first account of the day's news, from Associated Press reporter Dina Cappiello, noted the efforts of 350.org to make this happen.

SeqCentral Puts DNA Sequence Crunching In The Cloud The act of DNA sequencing results in massive amounts of data around the human genome. Currently, this data is housed in standalone super computers, which doesn’t allow for collaboration between scientists. SeqCentral is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today as a way for human genome scientists to match their data with publicly available data sets. SeqCentral offers highly-scalable genetic sequence alignment in the cloud. SeqCentral will allow scientists to compare their data to others to see if their sequencing is new or if it is “known.” And SeqCentral, which costs $99 per year for scientists, wants to help you do more than just be able to find additional data, but also aims to connect members of the genomics community, encouraging collaboration around sequencing. Q&A: Chi-Hua Chien, Keith Rabois, Sandya Venkatachalam and Lior Zorea weigh in on SeqCentral: LZ: What’s the market for this? SC: There’s a big market of individual scientists who will use this.

#newtwitterceo By all accounts Twitter is on a roll. We’ve redesigned our web site to great user feedback. Our user and usage numbers are growing at a rapid clip all around the world. We’ve launched an early, but successful, monetization effort. And, many top engineers, product designers, sales people and other key folks have joined our quickly growing team. In fact, there are 300 people working at Twitter today—compared to about 20 when I took the CEO job two years ago. The challenges of growing an organization so quickly are numerous.

SnapDragon Wants To Simplify Product Check-Ins And Entice Users With Comics We started with location check-ins. Then we moved to media check-ins. Now we’re onto product check-ins. The space is starting to fill up quickly, but are they all too convoluted? The new startup launching today at TechCrunch Disrupt isn’t trying to pull you into a specific store (like Shopkick). Yes, that’s right, comic books. The SnapDragon team has gotten some Bay Area comedians to write their little collectable virtual good comic books. The idea is clearly to make the idea of product check-ins fun without putting up too big of a barrier to entry (which many of the other product check-in services have). Here are the questions from judges Josh Felser, Joe Kraus, Todor Tashev, Robert Scoble, and Don Dodge (paraphrased): Q: How do you make money? A: We work with consumer product companies to deliver targeted coupons. Q: Have you talked to the brands yet? A: Yes a bit. Q: I think too many teams are focused on the product problem — but isn’t this a distribution problem? A: (Shakes head, yes).

s Monday Mashup #43 / we are social Content creation in the age of social networking A new study from Forrester sheds some new light on the field of participation and content creation levels in social media in 2010. As you may already know, every year Forrester updates its Social Technographics profiles, classifying social network users across different types (outlined in the table above). Even though social networking overall is on the rise with ‘Joiners’ massively on the rise across the board, it seems that this year the ‘Creators’ category has remained static (it’s actually declined very slightly in the US, Europe, China and Australia). Another interesting development is the addition of ‘Conversationalists’ to the list of existing profiles “to capture the short, rapid conversations that are now taking place on Twitter and through Facebook status updates”. Facebook tells us more about liking Facebook have just released some interesting stats on the use of the “Like” button. Will London claim the Super Swarm badge?

Social media and the Rutgers suicide »» Corruption on social web, ethics »» Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow} I’m sure you were disturbed, as I was, by the story of a young man who committed suicide when his sexual encounter was secretly captured on a video and posted on the Internet. The tragedy is doubly sobering for me because it occurred at Rutgers University where I begin a social media teaching assignment in a few weeks. I have read no fewer than three blog posts blaming the social web for this incident and after three it was time for me to stop reading. Humans have an incredible capacity for evil. We like to think of ourselves as civilized but we are not. The social web shines a bright light on whatever humans are already doing, both good and bad. Awhile ago I wrote a post predicting that by the end of 2011 there would be a social media crime or crisis that would force the channel to be legislated to some degree, probably around privacy. The social web has the ability to heal, connect and create but unfortunately, like its human creators, it will always have the ability to destroy.

iPad spends 20% of time in bed High performance access to file storage Among the interesting stats turned up by a new study of iPad usage is that 20 per cent of users' iPad time is spent in bed. That nugget was buried in a blog post by Stephen Baker, the NPD Group's VP of industry analysis, discussing his research group's just-released "iPad Owner Study." "It is obvious that the iPad form factor makes people feel warm and cuddly," writes Baker. Considering that a recent Nielsen survey discovered that 63 per cent of iPad owners are under 35 — significantly younger than owners of an Amazon Kindle or the study's representative netbook — we can only hope that a goodly chunk of that iPad bedtime time is spent with apps such as Naim Cesur's iKamasutra XL or an iBooks download of Violet Blue's Lust. Speaking of lust, the NPD survey also revealed that early iPad adopters are more satisfied than those who puchased theirs after the initial rush — satisified with their iPads, that is. In bed.

Graphene Just Won Two Guys the Nobel. So What the Hell Is It? Rumor: iLife '11 to be 64-bit, iOS compatible iLife, the software suite that is included on every Mac and is made up of iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand, iWeb, and iDVD, hasn't been updated to a new version since January, 2009. That, of course, is making many of us in the Apple world curious about when the next version of the suite will appear on the market. Many Mac pundits believe the next edition will be iLife '11, and we've already seen several of the rumored release dates fly past without sign of the new iLife. Now some sharp-eyed Apple fans have noticed that there's a book listed on the German Amazon site with the title "iLife '11: Digital pictures, movies, music and more" and a release date of December, 2010. The translated description notes that the suite is entirely 64-bit, and that iPhoto will receive integration with social networking. iWeb has been "rewritten" from the ground up, and iDVD is no longer included with the suite. The book is written by Uwe Nerger, who has no other published titles to his name. [via AppleInsider]

After fanfare, few Republicans campaigning on 'Pledge to America' PINEY RIVER, VA. - A week after House Republican leaders gathered at a lumberyard in Sterling to announce their "Pledge to America," one of the party's prized recruits stopped at a business about 150 miles away to make a campaign pitch about taxes, regulation and the government's role. Virginia state Sen. Robert Hurt touched on many of the themes of the pledge, but he didn't mention it by name or quote a single line from the 48-page document. He hadn't even looked at it. "I have not sat down and read it," said Hurt, adding that he had glimpsed "summaries of it." For all the fanfare and publicity that accompanied the pledge's release, relatively few Republican candidates nationwide appear to be adopting it as a guiding vision, much less incorporating it into their campaigns. That stands in contrast to the document the pledge is most often compared to, the 1994 "Contract With America," which Republicans announced just before they captured control of Congress.