With the huge success of social sharing, creative minds everywhere are coming up with new ideas to share their lives (in the form of updates, pictures, videos etc) with others.
Enter Pinterest.
What is Pinterest?
In a nutshell Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Just as you would pin things up your physical board as a reminder or for others to view, Pinterest is the online version.
You can use it to plan events, categorize your files, or share interesting multimedia that you find on the Web.
How Does Pinterest Work?
Pinterest users have online “pin boards” to which they attach various forms of media (could be a video, a product, a discussion, but most often is a picture). These items (known as ‘pins’) can be uploaded from personal hard drives or can be found online.
When someone finds something interesting online they “pin it” and can then group their pins into categorized ‘boards’.
You can browse other users’ pinboards, and what’s also nice is that you can then “re-pin” an item to your own board, like a Twitter retweet or a Facebook share. You can also comment on people’s pins.
The whole idea is to link people through common interests and passions.
You can sign up for a Pinterest account at pinterest.com
My Problem with Pinterest
It’s nothing new. It’s probably a nice idea, but personally I think the social sharing is getting out of hand. How many platforms are people going to have to join in order to stay in touch with friends or like-minded strangers?
There is already Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn which are the dominant three. More and more of these social sites are going to be popping up as developers realize how much money is to be made with them. For me, I’d rather just stick to one or two, or just send out an ‘old-fashioned’ email.
However…
That being said, Pinterest works well, it looks classy and the more creative / designer – minded will really appreciate it. And I’m sure people around the world (there are currently 10.5 million registered users) are grateful for the creation of Pinterest as another medium for them to easily share their interests.
Love it – and its gonna make them super wealthy …
pinterest.com/jonjonnienaber
Websites are getting more traffic because of pinterest than they get from Google, Google+ and a host of others combined! Scary!
I think its because of the ease of it – a place to store all the cool stuff you find online!
My fear – that as it becomes business friendly – out goes what made it special – a community of creative people sharing creative inspiration stuff … now filled with a void a yawn, me too type stuff, an commercial “awesomeness” …
Absolutely.
And I think Pinterest has every chance of going that way. Bloggers and webmasters will see another great medium to use to drive traffic to their sites.
It’s happened with all the others; Facebook and Twitter have become link-fests.
The only way to keep it ‘purely creative’ would be to block outbound links. But then you would also block a lot of cool, related stuff.
The other way would be to police it heavily like most forums are. Then if someone was using it as a link-farm, you could suspend that account.
Anyway, at the moment it looks good, and I reckon most of the users are very happy with it.
I just checked out your Pinboard. Very nice. I like some of your categories.
You have a lot of pins on there – must have taken quite a while to generate such a huge pile!
Yip – been on it for quite some time 😉 You should see the girlfriends – she’s a proper addict 😉 We use it as a source for collating ideas, coming up with new ideas and crafting business ideas – looks and feels etc …
pinterest.com/meryke_naude
I think the long term success ( as you mentioned ) is some form of self governance etc … or privacy settings of sorts … the calibre of the boards is ultimately decided by the person who pins! Following quality is perhaps the best way to go!