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Pin-teresting, Very Pin-teresting
Yesterday a co-worker began reading an article aloud about the rapid growth and success of a new vision board-styled social photo sharing website called Pinterest, which generated a giggle between myself and another co-worker, as we had been discussing Pinterest ourselves earlier in the afternoon. What a strange coincidence, or perhaps not. Recently released data from Hitwise claims that the traffic Pinterest generates is up almost 40-fold in the last SIX months and is already one of their top 10 social networking sites, and Pinterest is still invite-only open beta!
Total Visits Over Time
So, what is this peculiar phenomenon spreading like wildfire? We decided to play around with the site and take a look for ourselves. Luckily, I was already a member, so inviting my officemates was painless and instant.
My Boards Need a Bit of Work
Upon beginning, you are given five blank boards, though you do not have to use any of them and they are all fully customizable, so if you don’t require a “Books Worth Reading” board, you could easily change it to “Funny Things We Find While Working,” etc.; your boards are as unique as you are. From this point, you are free to roam the internet, looking for any and all pertinent photos or videos that you enjoy or think others will enjoy. This is where we began having issues. In theory, you can install a “Pin It” button onto your browser, and as you find photos on the web you want to add to your boards you can simply click the “Pin It” button and the photo will automatically copy to your boards; however, this option did not work for us, and pinning became a semi-laborious chore of having to copy and paste image URLs directly into Pinterest. We expect this minor kink to be worked out by Pinterest’s wide release.
Another thing we found strange was how Pinterest impulsively starts you off with “friends” to follow, and continues to make you force follow other users (including complete strangers) as you go. You do have the option to un-follow anyone you are following, but having to do this was an unpleasant, superfluous chore.
After the initial confusion, the girls in the office were hooked, pinning photos of fancy interior design elements and corgis, waiting impatiently for other users to “like” or “repin” their pics. This makes sense though, because Hitwise data shows that 58% of current users are female and 59% are between the ages of 25 and 44. Within an hour or so, each of them had pinned at least one photo, and they were both already generating “likes” and “repins” from individuals totally unknown to them. Although we collectively found this odd, their newfound sense of popularity with their random followers was more than enough to overcome their unease.
Despite its quirks, Pinterest has proven to be a fairly addictive pastime, and a novel way for people to share images that are interesting, provocative, entertaining, and/or personal to them. Get on board and start pinning!
An example of a busy Pinterest profile
