The social media space is nothing if not the boom town of the InterWebs, the gold rush of the Ethernet, the wild, wild west of 21st Century communication – except no one carries a six-shooter.
The latest big wave in the maelstrom of social media is, of course, Pinterest.
Unless you only live in World of Warcraft, you’ve no doubt heard something of Pinterest, the newest social curatorial site on which users post photographs (and other tidbits), attract attention to a wide variety of (mostly) sales sites and graphically yell, “hey, look at me,” …and buy what I’m selling. Users can “pin” and post, go to other links and generally, well, be social.
Photographer and blogger, Trey Ratcliff, a Pinterest advocate, calls it, “window shopping on steroids.”
It may prove to be that banal but for now, one must give Pinterest its due. Actually launched in 2008 in Palo Alto by a former Google staffer, Pinterest has come roaring onto the social media space only in the last couple of months, jumping to 11 million unique visits in January from just under five million in November. (If you’re counting, that’s 22 million eyeballs.)
It has yet to make any money, according to the Wall Street Journal, on a $37.5 million initial investment but is said to now be worth $200 million. But here’s the question of the day: is it useful? Well, we’ll sure find out, won’t we? The numbers certainly can’t be discounted and initial anecdotal evidence suggests risk is low and the reward potentially great. One little experiment suggested eight follows almost immediately by posting architecture photographs (with a Facebook login to Pinterest.)
Will we play with it more? You bet. Stayed tuned.
And in the meantime, Visit our TechTools Pinterst Board. It lists TechTools and sites we use every day working with and around the Interwebs. The list goes way beyond Social Media and contains mostly productivity tools to simplify process and collabortation. Make sure to comment if you use one of them and you can also ask questions. We'll be notified when you post a note.
Visual.ly tells us 83 percent of Pinterest’s users are women between the ages of 18 and 34 and 97 percent of Pinterest’s Facebook fans are women. This little tidbit prompted Time Magazine’s Techland blog to claim “women are from Pinterest and men are from Google+” because the later is populated two-thirds by men.
We can only imagine next up: a dating site to pair Pinterest women with Goo+ men.
