We've setup hotlinking for images under 1MB. We are rolling it out as a beta and it is free for all (requires registering a free My Megashares account).
If your image is hotlink-able, you will see a new list item and text box labeled "Hotlink:". We look to expand the hotlink features with more template text boxes for ease of pasting into your web pages and communities.
Hotlinked images currently fall under the same file retention policy (meaning impressions do not count as user downloads from megashares.com).

You asked: How long will Megashares keep my files without a download? Can it be increased?
We have received your feedback and complied to your requests!
We have increased our file retention policy to 45 days. 1 unique download in 15 days and 10 unique downloads in 45 days, then the 45 day counter will restart. This is a big jump from our previous FRP and is a nice middle ground until we role out subscriptions that include perpetual diskspace.

UPDATE:
many are asking what happened to older files as they have been removed. We issued the new policy today, that means anything uploaded previous to today was still bound to the old file retention policy. Feel free, as it is free, to re-upload any content that was removed and it will be placed under our new FRP.

We had a brief outage today during some network upgrades. They failed on the first attempt, and succeeded on a second go. We still have a couple more switches to schedule in. Any interruption during the next upgrade will be virtually transparent.

One of our large storage units needs to come offline for repair. The ETA for repair is 1-2 weeks. The data itself is fine and will be returned online after repairs are completed.

[update]
we have activated a snapshot on a backup server that has most of data available up to last week (~5 days).

One of our datacenters will be upgrading their backup systems between 2AM-6AM PDT. We do not plan to have any downtime or outages, however, it is best to be prepared in the event that an upgrade runs long or Murphy's law kicks in where if something can go wrong it will - meaning we will be monitoring their process and if we see the need we may turn down some connections to prevent sudden disruption.

[edit] this has been delayed due to parts not shipping on time. We will update or create a new quickblog when the next update is scheduled.

[edit] updates appear to be complete, however, we did experience a brief period of downtime. All is well now.

Over the next few days we will be upgrading both our front and back end systems. This will basically improve performance. There will be some content unavailable during some upgrades and at times other services will probably show degraded performance while associated systems execute necessary updates.

Soon links will appear when you reach certain My Megashares Cache Levels. These levels are outlined in the FAQ, but here's some exciting excerpts:

Extend your current (or any friend, colleague, etc) linkcard and ability to give points to another user (some need help, some like to help).

[edit]
We forgot to add that you can create a NEW linkcard from your cache points. There have been many emails (thanks!) asking if it is possible to create linkcards for other users, the answer is yes and we will support them as regular linkcard users!

this qb is getting long but just to be clear: you can extend ANY linkcard and you can CREATE a new linkcard, you can also extend a linkcard that has been created. Whatever your cache points allow you to do, go for it!

We've changed much here. New tab'd layout giving you more with a single click without pageloads or dialog boxes.

Many more features you will soon see come from your content portal - we'll continue to tik them off as we push 'em.

The Video/Image tabs are in testing. You can create a clip of videos you upload and we'll have lots of features to manage, manipulate and share your visual content.

[edit] we're pushing this code momentarily.

First qkbg (quickblog, the acronym may change at any given time for the sake of humor/insanity/mocking web society)... New Megashares layout. What do you think? (don't really tell us, we are not changing it j/k we will if your suggestion is super cool). If you do think you see a bug or something that makes your eyes twitch lettuce know.

We added a blog! Ahh, not really, it is more like a blog without the clutter, but not tiny like a twit(ter). This is Megashares QuickBlog, short update pops for you to read about what you see (like the new layout). The answers to questions will remain in FAQ and the updates/changes/maintenance to the site will be qb'd here.