A thing called Pinterest

So most have heard of tumbler a rally ugly digital cork board sure they can be useful but hell you really cant trace back images to source and that can create issues when you want to attribute or even find out if you have permission to use those images. Pinterest is much better and I like it but I'm really like one of 5 guys on the site and I'm not sure why women are so much more fond of the system but as a design tool I have found it very valuable. Check mine out here to get a better idea what it is.  So to start with you need to apply for an invitation to the site, it's not hard. So you can link through Facebook or twitter and then even use that as you method of login as well. You can pin images and videos(youtube only sorry vimeo) and add a few notes to it and assign it to a board and you do the pinning though a bookmark link you just at to your bookmark bar.  Also you can follow, be followed, browse, like and repin and all the actions maintain a link to the original source so you always know where it came from. What's is good for?

This is the digital mood board or theme board. And what is so great in my mind it all the information you have beyond just the images and videos. On cool feature is to see what other pins have come from that site so this is also a content discovery system. You can create a wish list, or organize your thoughts and if you want to you can use this to inventory your belongings and I don't think that is a point anyone has brought up yet. And of course there is an iphone app that is good for browsing but also uploading and pinning photos you take. Really the current uses are very two dimensional and are just scratching the surface, it makes me want to program.

The Competition 

Okay so we are all familiar with how copycat the internet is and in this case they have gone in a different direction a stupid direction. So I have found 5 or 6 newer sites that do the exact same thing as Pinterest but focus on one aspect, Bling is for shopping, there is one for color pallets and to be honest its pretty crap and MyModernMetropolis has some good content and is about trend spotting and art. And all f these site are fails, they lack the ease of use and user base to make this guy want to join. And really I don't want to join twelve of these sites to do what I can on just one. If I want to create a trend board I can, color pallet easy enough there is no reason to use the other variations.

The Future

So now I'm looking forward to manipulation of the data on Pinterest. How about a way to make a digital collage of one of the boards formated to print? Or roll in a color sampler to ad specific cmyk/rgb values? Could there be some sort of high end cross linking and filters that works like Netflix's to suggest sites to look at based on your pins.