Alan Schaaf, a 21 year old college student, created the website imgur.com in February of 2009. He did all of the coding work for the site in his spare time and continues to maintain it by himself when he finds time in between his classes and other activities.
The website itself is a start-up image hosting service. Concerned by what he saw as the complexity or annoyingness of other image hosting sites, Alan thought that he could create something simpler. Imgur, therefore, has an extremely simple interface that allows people to post photos online and distribute them using links to the rest of the internet.
Imgur has gained notoriety mostly as an image hosting service for content that appears on other social networks. On websites like Digg.com and particularly on Reddit, most of the image stories that are submitted are via imgur links. Because of this, the site has gained unbelievable amounts of traffic – over 88,000 new images are uploaded every day, and 94 million are downloaded – using a whopping 13 terabytes of bandwidth.
The site’s wild popularity shows what can happen when somebody with a little bit of time and determination and a really good idea gets to work on an internet start-up. In only 2 years, a college student could change the face of the internet.
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