Imgur.com understands social media better than any other image-storage service on the Internet.

“How the hell did flickr get through our defenses?”

They started by posting high-quality, original humorous images. They then got the attention of Reddit but being the “go to pic place”. Digg and other social news sites are starting to get it.

How did they get so strong so quickly? They kept it simple.

1. Shortened URL instantly
2. Two clicks to post
3. Link straight to the image without ads
4. Profit

They are everything that tinypic isn’t. You don’t need an account. You don’t need an email. You find an image, post it, and score. It owns the Pics subreddit, a huge one with over 130K subscribers. It’s the most common image source on Digg now with more front pages every day. In short, Imgur understands how to appeal to social media users. If alexa is to be trusted, it’s worked. Their reach has increased by 392% in 3 months and they are closing in on being a top 2000 site in the world.

While they aren’t nearly as big as imageshack, tinypic, or flickr, it should only be a matter of time for them to build up the site-bulk required to compete with other image services. Either way, we give them mega-kudos to really understanding Web 2.0.