Thursday, February 16, 2012

Pinteresting

I first heard of the Pinterest website from the OurAwesomePlanet.com blog which I subscribe to. The author of said blog used Pinterest to make an online collection of the “It’s More Fun in the Philippines” memes that circulated a couple of weeks ago in social networking sites.

Pinterest is an online pinboard / photo sharing website where users create and manage theme-based image collections by categorizing the photos they have ‘pinned’ into the various categories found in the site such as “food and drink” or “film music and books” or “things I love”. The site's mission statement is to "connect everyone in the world through the 'things' they find interesting."


In order for one to register for a Pinterest account, s/he must receive an invitation from an already registered user on Pinterest or request an invitation directly from the Pinterest website. Pinterest allows users to follow the activity (similar to Facebook and Twitter, right?) of other Pinterest users . A Tastemakers page suggests relevant users to follow. When viewing the site's homepage, a user sees a "Pin Feed" that shows activity among the boards and pinners that the user follows.

Pinterest derives income from modifying users' affiliate links to commercial sites. By replacing the original affiliate tracking code with a Pinterest version, any affiliate payment is passed to Pinterest instead of the original affiliate,

A recent article mentions that Pinterest’s popularity is fast growing and that traffic to the website has grown tenfold over the past six months. Roughly 68% of Pinterest's users are women.

Pinterest also has found favor with e-commerce retailers, many of which have added its "Pin it" button to their websites. A Pinterest app is likewise available for iPhone.


Legal issue: Copyright

Similar to other sites with user uploaded content, Pinterest has procedures in place to deal with the posting of copyrighted images and other material, where content owners can report a violation and have the content taken down. Pinterest said copyright problems "haven't been a significant issue so far."

Sources:

Wall Street Journal Online and Wikipedia


Agnes M. Santiago, Entry #9

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