Are you pinterest-ed?
New Social Phenomenons are simple to stumble upon but hard to get to the bottom of. The latest global superstar is Pintrest, a small company started by Ben Silbermann, an Iowa based ex-Google employee. The site was launched in March 2010 and today has record breaking pageviews, mainly down to the addictive nature of ‘pinning’ images from any page in the web.
We at Devstars are not shy to get involved and have been pinning for a few weeks now. At first it seemed a little alien as the vast majority of content is generated in the USA. Just by clicking on the sports section of the site brings up many American sports as you would expect but the main difference is the gender of the pinned content. We found an interesting infographic here exposing the striking differences between US and UK ‘Pinteresters’.
The UI & UX job on this site is first class, once you have installed a ‘pin it’ link to your browser bar you can instantly pin any image in a page whilst you browse. Every time you pin an image you are asked to share that image on Facebook and Twitter or just see your pin. Driving users to view their pins each time must be one of the reasons for such high pageview stats.
After a few days of pinning I can see the appeal, sometimes facebook has too many buttons to push just to throw an idea into your webspace. Pintrest makes it very simple to organise your own boards, grouping similar interest images in one spot. You can group a whole board based just on your favourite colour, music or hobby. Other users can choose to follow, like and share the content of these boards without too much fuss. All in all, this is one new social channel that will probably be around for some time (at least 6 months!)
MG
