If you haven’t yet participated in the daily deals craze, you’ve at least read a bit of news about Groupon’s ridiculous growth or get daily deals spam in your inbox that you really want to stop getting, but can’t quite bring yourself to halt just in case one of those future daily deals emails contains something you actually want to use. Market research firm Lab42 wanted to get to the bottom of the daily deals craze and surveyed 500 social media users who have an account with at least one daily deals site, taking note of tidbits like which sites said social media users are members of, how often they check for new deals, and how much they end up spending on said deals. Head on past the break to see the results in everyone’s favorite informative, prettier-than-text format.

Software piracy has had a very interesting, successful history. From bulletin boards, to FTP sites, to IRC fileservers, to the currently popular torrent, the methods of software piracy moves with the times, and modernizes as fast and as frequently as any other technology. Whether or not one supports or abhors software piracy, its long and innovative history is always interesting, and the speed at which software becomes cracked and distributed after release is always impressive, regardless of how illegal it is. The folks over at Starmedia have put together a neat infographic about the history of software piracy, which includes some interesting numbers, such as the average amount of illegal downloads at any given time, based on company. Check out the full infographic after the break.

Since we’re all so used to the Facebook way of social networking, finding your way around Google+ and getting a good feel for what you’re actually doing can be a little tough. If you feel like you need a little extra assistance or at least a way to check your answers, we’ve got some Google+ cheat sheets for you. Simon Laustsen, a dude from Denmark, took the time to write up these charts as a service to humanity and I, on behalf of humanity, thank him.

These cheat sheets will definitely help you find your way around Google+ land, but they also seem to indicate at best, how complex Google+ is, and at worst, how un-user-friendly it is right now. Either way, if you hadn’t spent the last 5 years with a Facebook IV drip, that interface would probably be a little baffling too. Check out another Laustsen cheat sheet and a handy flowchart from a fellow with the amazing name of Lee Swagerty, after the jump.

Japan isn’t buying the Nintendo 3DS for all the seasons one might expect: Poor current library of games, a hefty price tag, or because they’re satisfied by other handheld systems. Though we have Japan’s reasons, what exactly led to them? Couldn’t Nintendo have done something about it? After all, they’re in control of their own handheld. After the break, check out the full chart explaining how Nintendo killed interest in the Nintendo 3DS. It only took Nintendo one year to do so — hey, they’re still good at something!

With the famous video-phone service Skype now in the hands of Microsoft, you might be wondering about its origins and how it came to be worth nearly $9 billion in the eight years since its creation. This infographic covers the history of the company, and the software, that has let people from around the world talk to each other face to face and took phone sex to a whole new level.

Read on after the break for the jumbo-sized full version.

If the New York Times article from a few weeks back about how sitting down will make you fat and/or kill you wasn’t frightening enough, now, there’s an infographic on the same subject, complete with chairs casting sinister shadows as they spout such statistics as “Sitting 6+ hours per day makes you up to 40% likelier to die within 15 years than someone who sits less than 3. Even if you exercise.” The presentation is a tad on the sensationalistic side, and it’s from a site called “Medical Billing and Coding,” but it’s hard not to be a little spooked by stuff like this if you are a knowledge worker by profession.

Infographics have been fairly popular in the age of the Internet, as people learned to trick others into thinking digesting information is a lot more fun when it’s plastered on a graphic. It seems someone caught the trick, as the above infographic about infographic states, “Just because it’s graphical, it doesn’t mean it’s useful.”

(Ariel Waldman via BuzzFeed)

Search and social blog Single Grain reminds us what the world would be like without Facebook. A cruel and desolate place, no doubt, where one has to send emails to show off pictures and call people on the phone if one should plan an event. Head on past the break to see the full graphic, and be thankful we no longer have to force our previous night’s exploits into a conversation and can simply post them on Facebook for all to see.

We’ve posted plenty of infographics in our day, and this has to be one of the coolest sets we’ve seen: Columbian photographer Jose Duarte has used real-world materials to construct a series of infographics representing the state of the Internet. These are a lot more memorable than the bevy of overly graphic-designed infographic SEO plays by insurance companies and online schools, no? Hopefully this proof of concept leads to more compelling data visualization across the Web.

Full set below:

But hashtags and @ replies would make real-life conversations so much better! #Amirite? Anyone? Column Five Media has put together this clever infographic detailing ten signs that you should really cut back on your social media intake, buddy.