Pinterested? A(nother) primer

Since joining a few weeks back, I've seen quite a few blog posts and articles (such as this one) crop up about how best to use Pinterest, which I would succinctly describe as a visual social bookmarking service.  It's still in invitation-only mode (if you'd like an invitation, feel free to contact me for one), it allows for users to:

  • Create collections of bookmarks ("boards").
  • Boards may be assigned a category, which others can then search for and browse through.
  • Boards can be either solely editable by oneself, or contributed to by other users, whom one can specify by name.
  • Boards may be "liked" via Facebook plugin.
  • Add bookmarks as represented by either images and videos, either found anywhere online (publicly accessible), or via upload.
  • At the time of pinning, one can use Facebook and/or Twitter to share out the pin.
  • Comment on any pinned items.
  • "Like" and "re-pin" items.
  • Follow all of or a subset of other users' boards.
  • Draw users' attention to pins by @ referring to them like in Twitter.

So far, it seems to have a somewhat older and quite female demographic - and initially it was easiest to trawl through Wikipedia to populate my favourite foods board, though since then I've been adding more boards, since.

Truth be told, I haven't fully taken advantage of all its features. Even so, it's clear that there would be many more ways to benefit from it, such as what's listed in this "creative use" suggestion list.

Here's my "to try" list:

  • Hack the URL here: http://pinterest.com/source/[Web site URL here]/ to find all pins that have been stored already from that site.
  • Plan a vacation using others' input for accommodation, dishes, sights etc.
  • Compile a "must see" collection of film/plays/musicians etc.
  • Assign my own graphics to my blog posts, and collect permalinks to my blog entries to publish there.

For my professional interest, I've started a board for infographics related to SEO and SMM and such, which has resulted in the highest individual board following count of all my boards so far. 


And for fun, I've created a photography board that solely contains my handiwork, mainly courtesy of my DSLR-like point and shoot (for those wondering what I use), though if I really get the hang of using my smartphone camera, I may pin some of those, too, as they are automatically uploaded via G+. I use my eponymous hashtag oh my photos to see if I can somewhat track how widespread my images become re-pinned, although when a user does re-pin an item, s/he has the option of editing the caption that's associated with it.


Upon first authenticating (with my Facebook credentials), I found that I was instantly following over 60 Facebook friends who had likewise allowed linkage of their accounts with Facebook. I'm also easily able to invite any other Facebook friends who have yet to join, but strangely, it doesn't (yet) have similar support for Twitter despite its integration as a publishing medium. Also, I've found browser-based differences in reliability (e.g. Chrome won't let me pin videos), but its bookmarklet function is extremely convenient to use, and it's easy to convert the time-sink of random web-surfing into an exercise to accrue Pinterest pins.

Comments

  1. Interesting...I may have to try it. Yet another time sink... ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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