Neil Vidyarthi

Have you ever used Reddit? If so — and I hope you have — you’ve probably clicked on an image here or there. A few years ago, those image links would have pointed to all sorts of different hosting services like imageshack and tinyimage, but those sites didn’t seem to do the trick for Reddit users. Some weren’t fast enough, some had too many ads. Whatever the reason, a Redditor named Alan Schaaf decided to put together a site to service Reddit better.

That site was imgur, and it now serves over 2 Billion monthly page views. Check out the infographic to see imgur’s path from 2009 to today.

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When talking about Google+, the number to quote is usually 100 million users.  That’s what was announced as part of Google’s latest announcement and also seems to check out with web pundits based on the fact that Gmail has an estimated 60 million users and many of those are grandfathered in to the Google+ social network.  However, a recent analysis by RJMetrics is looking at just how active the users of Google+ are, and whether the social network is the equivalent of a special matinee showing for The Artist on Mother’s Day.

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Vanity Fair is reporting that a new sitcom entitled “Friend Me” has just been ordered to series by CBS and will feature characters who work at Groupon.  In January, when news first broke of the pilot episode, Groupon denied that it had any involvement in the show, but that’s because it was a one off pilot.  Now that the show will be airing weekly, will Groupon need to intervene in some way?

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There was once a time when you’d type up your resume on your old fashioned word processor, add a little flair and a unique (but not irresponsible) font and print it out to deliver by hand to a prospective employer.  Those days are long gone, and today’s job hunt is new territory for people on all sides of the fence.  A new infographic looks at the history of social recruiting and provides some startling statistics about how many people are using it — for instance, 49% of employed Americans are looking for new jobs on social networks.

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Quora, the social question and answer site that was all the rage in 2009, has raised $50 million as reported by the Wall Street Journal. Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and an early Facebook investor, was one of the main contributors, along with Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo who put $20 million of his own money. Will this give Quora the infusion of capital necessary to regain its web buzz and begin to monetize?

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Buying one share of a stock will not lead to extensive financial gains or losses, but for those interested in a collectible fromFacebook’s Friday initial public offering, the social network will issue paper stock certificates, according to its IPO filing.

Read more at AllFacebook

Did you know that 96 percent of the top 250 internet retailers have a presence on Twitter, and command an average follower count of 57,097?

These impressive numbers are only bettered by Facebook, which has a slight edge over Twitter in overall usage (97 percent) but dwarfs the micro-blobbing network in audience size. The top Facebook-using internet retailers average almost one million fans a piece, and some 43 retailer Facebook Pages have more than a million Likes.

Read more at AllTwitter

PostSecret is no longer a secret.  The postcard secrets service that lets people send in their deepest anonymous secrets on a home-made postcard has been running since 2005, and founder Frank Warren took the time out to talk with the Reddit community on Friday to answer people’s questions about the service.

Frank introduced himself and answered questions for hours.  He discussed some of the weirdest and wildest postcards he’d ever seen, and although he had a few hiccups with the format, people seemed to dig his answers and he got a ton of upvotes, unlike that Rampart star who botched his AMA recently.  Here is one of his most upvoted comments.

For me the most disturbing secret was a photograph of a young girl who had cut her face so that it appeared as though she was crying blood tears. (I just remember that image not the secret.)

Another time I was contacted by the FBI about a secret. I am unable to share the details of that secret.

He also answered the big question of how he actually determines what to put in the book.

I get hundreds every week and try to select secrets for postsecret.com that I have not seen before or that express a common secret in a new of visually interesting way. I always try to include secrets that touch on the full range of human emotion. So there will always be at least one secret that’s funny, shocking, erotic, controversial, hopeful, etc. I also try to arrange the secrets so they tell a story.

Check out the entire Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) here.  Also, Frank also linked to his TED talk, where he talks about “half a million secrets” and reveals some of the best he’s ever seen. It’s a highly entertaining watch!

On Friday, a Kickstarter engineer discovered a small bug in Kickstarter’s private API.  The bug allowed a user’s private project data to be accessed via the API.  No financial data was compromised, but users with private projects may have had some of their information leaked.  Kickstarter reports that 48 projects were accessed during the weeks where the bug was live, but there’s no telling whether those were authorized by the original project owners or not.

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Are you ready for the “new Bing”?  Microsoft is updating their search engine and the upgrades include a revamped design with three panels, an increased amount of social information and a snapshot feature that lets you preview the results.  The sidebar is especially interesting, as it directly interfaces with Facebook and allows users to ask their friends questions about a given search query.

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