Quite a surprise to most of us, Reddit has reported its plans to double up the programming team.  The news is surprising because this social bookmarking company is hiring after nearly five years of quiet, lean management.  But thanks to their growth in year 2010, they have finally decided to do something in the way of team expansion. Just last week, they announced the hiring four new team members and now they have decided to almost double up the team sizing by hire three more programmers.  The growth of the development team means they’re on a path similar to StumbleUpon’s, utilizing new ways to leverage individual cloud data.  It’s a revival that’s circling big data trends, and it’s bringing new life to old systems that we’ve all but forgotten about.

Reddit actually requires a frontend programmer, a backend programmer, and someone in between. But the most interesting thing is the way of hiring the professionals. As a part of selection process, they will be asking the candidates to clone Reddit and then to rebuild the backend tool that they use to find gamers of their system. Only if you are able to do any of these, you will be able to send resume.  Given the evolving nature of social bookmarking, this is an important consideration for new hires, and a core principle for the end product’s ability to maintain integrity and operate comprehensively for end users.

The industry has seen lots of changes and developments are going on. Recently, we heard of Digg’s CEO Matt Williams turning profits from side project Revision3, whose success is increasing every year, along with revenues, becoming a top independent video channel on Roku. In spite of the success of this side project, Digg itself is facing its own woes in maintaining the popularity of its social bookmarking system, as it is gradually losing relevancy to Facebook and other niche content recommendation networks.

Although social bookmarking is emerging in many forms, a recent example is the rise of Springpad, which recently beat out Evernote in terms of traffic.  Others, however, are facing defeat. Taking Delicious as an example, it was on the verge of shutting down, as it is one of the causalities of Yahoo facing holiday season layoffs and overall corporate reassessment.  Yahoo is trying to keeping the panic level down among users concerned about the data they’ve stored in this personal cloud service, by giving relevant explanations. Here is a snippet from the Yahoo’s side:

Is Delicious being shut down? And should I be worried about my data?

“No, we are not shutting down Delicious. While we have determined that there is not a strategic fit at Yahoo!, we believe there is a ideal home for Delicious outside of the company where it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive.”

What if I want to get my bookmarks out of Delicious right away?

“As noted above, there’s no reason to panic. We are maintaining Delicious and encourage you to keep using it. That said, we have export options if you so choose. Additionally, many services provide the ability to import Delicious links and tags.

On the positive side, Evernote’s performance in the industry has solidified its stance as one of the premier emerging social bookmarking on the web. Evernote CEO Phil Libin said in an interview,

“Evernote downloads are up 1000% for Android, but only 150% for the iPhone. This puts the number of users on both Android and iOS platforms much closer to each other with the iPhone keeping a very marginal lead over Android.”

Evernote recently got a funding of $500,000 that helped it come out from a pitfall and get back to a stable financial position. Later on, it also raised $20 million in additional funds making a total of $43 million, which is a really good thing.

Moving ahead, Big Data is also affecting the social networking industry at large, as Tagged makes new friendship with it.  In an interview with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, Johann Schleier-Smith, CEO of Tagged told about how they use Big Data to enhance user experience and he expects the next generation of social technology will lead him. His views on Big Data clearly reflected that how people generated data requires a social context in order to be useful to both the customers and the business.