Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest, Pinterest… I hear this term all over the internet and even in news articles. Why is it so popular? Why do I care? How different is it from other social media sites? Before we go there, lets discuss what Pinterest is.
What is Pinterest?
Pinterest is a social bookmarking tool that allows users to create visual bookmarks by “pining” images from anywhere on the internet and videos on Youtube. Another way of looking at it is that it is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to manage and collect images that are interesting to them and being able to share it with others. Pinterest's mission in a way is to connect and share with everyone through the images everyone find interesting.
What has happened so far?
During the last quarter of 2011, Pinterest grow almost 400%. Recent studies show that Pinterest drives more visitors to third party websites than other social media outlets including Google+ and LinkedIn. Some recently released data by Modea shows around 68% of Pinterest users are women, and 28.1% of users have an average household income of over $100,000. Furthermore, about half of the users have children and more than 27% are between the ages of 25 and 34.
One of the main factors to Pinterest success was its openness to the many different type of users it attempts to attract and it connection to products that could be sold on the internet. For example, Delicious, a similar bookmarking service, targeted a specific set of users, and failed to grow. Canv.as, another similar pinboard concept, focused on those users who likes inside jokes. Pinterest on the other hand provides no barrier to entry and catered to everyone on the web including online vendors. In addition, Pinterest placed a heavy emphasis on customer’s perspective when designing the site itself. What about other factors?
Easy to Share:
From a customer’s perspective, the tool needs to be easy to use and that it doesn’t require much effort to perform a task. Pinterest has made it very easy to share content on the web. For example, when the tool is enabled and as user browses the web, and finds something interesting they determine to be worth pining, they click on the bookmarket toolbar and just click on the content they see without needing to switch to another application or browser. It is very integrated and simple making pining progress easy.
Visual:
The other factor leading to success is that social sites are becoming more visual over time. A unique part of it is that Pinterest is an image driven site with an emphasis on visual content. It is social network that is solely dedicated to sharing beautiful and interesting images. In human nature, human beings tend to be attracted and gravitate to beautiful things, and since Pinterest with the help of it users helps identify what those are, more and more people will be drawn to Pinterest’s collection of beautiful things.
So what about other image sharing sites such as Flicker?
Well not use Flicker? Even though Flicker allows its users to share images over the internet, it doesn’t allow you to follow and browse the pins of other people as well as repining their images to your own. In a way, Pinterest offers more of an integrated and robust way to share with each other. Another difference is the fact where the images are stored. For Flickr, the images are stored on Flickr’s storage, while images on Pinterest are links or pointers to where the source image is stored (and not Pinterest’s storage). The way how it works is as follows: you can do this by simply entering the link of the image you found interesting on the net. Pinterest would then extract the image for you and post it on your profile.
Furthermore, Flickr impose a policy on the size and number of photos you can upload, while Pinterest has no such restrictions allow users to pin as many things as they want.
What I particularly like about Pinterest is the ability to organize according to a theme or context. For example, a photo of a flower arrangement may pinned in completely different ways by three different users. In some ways this mimics the various systems of organization by which any given item might be catalogued or archived based on its provenance and context.
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