Guest author Derek Brown is a technology executive and analyst who blogs at One Blind Squirrel.

Pinterest is a three-year-old start-up with what is rumored to be no revenue to date. Zero. In fact, by all accounts, it hasn’t even attempted to generate revenue yet. In three years! Hard to fathom in this day and age, isn’t it?

And, yet, some of the sharpest minds in the venture capital community are so confident in Pinterest’s team and business that they recently invested in the company at an eye-popping valuation of $2.5 billion. Yes, billion!

If you were involved in the Internet economy of the late-1990s, as was I, you may be rolling your eyes right about now and muttering to yourself about Pets.com, Kozmo, Webvan, theGlobe.com, govWorks, Boo.com, eToys and all the other so-called-companies that were, for one brief moment in time, valued as if they had discovered the cure to cancer, only to be out of business a few short quarters later. Ahh... the memories.

Assuming that Pinterest’s investors share many of the same recent memories (or, more aptly, nightmares), what could be so compelling about the company and opportunity that would justify their support of such a lofty valuation this time around?

Passion At Scale

In short, I believe it is the economics of passion at scale.

Pinterest, in its own words, is “a tool for collecting and organizing things you love).” (Italics mine.) By pinning images from around the Web to their own board(s) or browsing others’ pinboards for images (which can then be “liked” or “re-pinned” to their own board(s)), users are able to create, manage, share and discover highly personalized image collections that define their passions.

Vintage fashion. Wind surfing. Gourmet cooking. Disneyana. Digital photography. Wedding gowns. Home decor. Camping. Italian design. Rolex watches. Travel planning. Architecture. Mid-century furniture. Urban farming. Knitting. Cross-Fit... The list of people’s passions is literally endless; and, Pinterest helps its users collect, organize and maintain all of them. On their own (or, with the help of the broader community). In granular, image- and/or SKU-specific detail.

Self-identified passionistas on a product-by-product basis — are you kidding? I’m not sure a marketer or merchant could dream of more fertile ground among a set of unknown people, short of seeing a prospective customer standing directly in front of items on a shelf, with cash already in hand. And, I’m not even convinced that would be more compelling on a long-term basis.

What could possibly be better? How about having that level of insight into the interests and intents and aspirations of not hundreds of thousands, but tens of millions, of people per month! According to press reports, Pinterest is already doing just that, hosting roughly 30 million unique monthly visitors who are generating more than 2.5 billion page views, the majority of which are likely coming through little more than domestic word-of-mouth promotion.

Fast forward three years and I think it’s entirely reasonable to assume that Pinterest is successful at growing its user base and traffic flows by 5 times, fueled by existing users continuing to build out their identities, waves of more mainstream domestic users finally catching on and contributions from millions of new pinners (their word, not mine) in overseas markets. That’s a lot of passion under one roof!

Passion Pays

On the business side of the house, passion pays. Extremely well.

Advertising, alone, could generate several hundred million dollars of revenue per year. Let’s say, hypothetically, that Pinterest follows in the footsteps of virtually every sizable media company on the planet, by introducing advertisements of some sort across its pages in the next few years. With marketers across every vertical likely salivating at the prospect of reaching into the company’s massive, impassioned and finely segmentable audience, it seems more than plausible that advertising rates across the company’s site could be at least 50% higher (if not considerably more) than the current industry average. Accordingly, with 12.5 billion page views per month (three years from now) and a site-wide CPM of, say, $4, Pinterest would generate advertising revenue of roughly $50 million per month, or about $600 million per year.

And yet, despite this sum, Pinterests more intriguing revenue opportunity at Pinterest lay in its role as a direct facilitator of online commerce.

Passions, as we all know, cost money — lots of it, over extended periods of time; and, it is money that we are, on some level, actually excited to spend. So, whether it’s a weekend warrior who pins a Burton snowboard, or a hobbyist portrait photographer pinning a Zeiss lens, or a budding interior decorator who pins the perfect accent table on Fab, Pinterest has the potential to become an economic kingmaker when these enthusiasts transition into consumers looking to purchase the goods/services that bring their passions to life.

Projecting Pinterest's Numbers

To appreciate the financial implications of Pinterest’s role in the transaction cycle, think of the service as a massive affiliate that gets paid for delivering customers to online merchants. If just ~3% of its 150 million+ users (three years from now) decide to indulge in their passions by clicking from a "want-to-have" product image on one of their own Pinterest boards to a relevant online merchant, the company could claim a direct role in driving 4.5 million transactions per month. Assuming an average transaction size of $200 (remember, people are buying their passions, not everyday staples), Pinterest’s users would account for ~$900 million worth of monthly purchases. Were the company to receive a 7% affiliate “take”/lead fee/commission on these sales, it would generate transactional revenue of about $60 million per month, or $720 million per year.

As if annual revenue of $1.3 billion (from just two sources) weren’t enough, the company’s margin profile has the potential to be the envy of most. Based on my 15+ years of experience evaluating a wide variety of online marketplace business models, it wouldn’t surprise me if Pinterest were able to sustain gross margins of 90% or more and adjusted EBITDA margins comfortably in excess of 25% (even while continuing to invest heavily in future growth). At these levels, the company would generate adjusted EBITDA of approximately $325 million per year.

Worth It? Or Not?

So... were Pinterest’s investors ultimately wise to value the company at $2.5 billion? No comment.

Will the company generate any annual revenue, let alone $1.3 billion, and adjusted EBITDA of $325 million in a few short years? I don't know.

Will Pinterest eventually be worth $5 million or $50 billion? I can’t wait to find out.

Those purposeful vagaries aside, though, I clearly see the underpinnings of a company with tremendous potential and, if I squint just enough, a business that could be the driver of billions of dollars of passion-fueled online commerce each year — and that’s a position that few companies ever even have the chance to dream about.

Guest author Justin Smith is product engagement manager for BloomReach.

Understanding what people do on different social networks is the key to effectively using those networks for marketing. Companies currently spend 8.4% of their marketing budgets on social media, and that’s expected to grow to 21.6% in the next five years. But with so many social networks competing to grab marketing dollars, determining the most effective channels can be extremely difficult. To illustrate, let’s look at how Facebook and Pinterest stack up against one another.

Different Networks For Different Reasons

While both Facebook and Pinterest offer deep customer segmentations and user engagement, it would be a mistake to target audiences in the same way across both networks. For example, you wouldn’t market your product to someone shopping at a trendy boutique the same way you would to someone walking down the street with their friends. In a store, you’d likely look to make a sale, while on the street you’d probably have more luck building brand awareness.

Similarly, BloomReach’s analysis consistently shows that Pinterest has a higher concentration of people who are in a ‘buy’ state of mind, while Facebook users are more interested in interacting with friends - and brands. (According to Paul Adams, Facebook’s global head of brand design, Facebook’s strength is relationship-building, noting that many lightweight interactions over time can help promote brands.)

Traffic Analysis Tells The Tale

That is borne out by BloomReach’s analysis of total traffic – 46,277,543 site visits – for a set of retail clients from Sept. 20 through Dec. 31, 2012. We looked at five key metrics: total traffic, revenue per visit, conversion rate, bounce rate and average pages viewed. While Facebook delivered more than 7.5 times the traffic, Pinterest handily won the remaining four areas:

• Pinterest traffic spent 60% more than did traffic coming from Facebook.
• Pinterest traffic converted to a sale 22% more than Facebook.
• Facebook traffic bounced 90% of the time, compared to 75% for Pinterest.
• Facebook users viewed an average of 1.6 pages. Pinterest users saw an average of 2.9 pages – an 81% difference.

The average revenue per visit for Pinterest traffic was more than $1.50. But while Pinterest is able to drive highly lucrative leads – and the release of Pinterest’s Analytics Tool for Businesses should help companies make use of them - it can deliver only a relatively limited set of eyeballs.

Facebook Still Rules Awareness

If a company’s goal is to simply reach a larger audience to create or maintain brand awareness, Facebook remains the best option. Its sheer volume of users – 1.06 billion active monthly users, 680 million mobile users and 618 million daily users – and the army of people ready to sell impressions make it an easy channel to leverage. But it may be difficult to realize an immediate return on marketing investments on the network.

Perhaps the best approach is to look for ways to optimize Facebook campaign while expanding Pinterest presence. Both Facebook and Pinterest should become larger parts of the media mix model as visitor referrals from these sites grow. At the end of 2012, only 2.7% of total traffic in our analysis came from the networks, demonstrating that social commerce is still in an early stage. In the meantime, though, it seems fair to say that Pinterest is a more efficient marketing channel than Facebook.

What better way to celebrate the week hackers ran rampant than with another security breach? Zendesk, a company that offers IT support tools and customer service software, announced on Thursday that it had been hacked. In a blog post, CEO Mikkel Svane stated, "We've become aware that a hacker accessed out system this week," though he did not say by which method or for how long.

What separates this attack from the malicious malware that infected machines at Facebook and Apple is that these hackers managed to compromise a healthy amount of Zendesk's stored user data, putting users of three of the company's big clients - Twitter, Tumblr and Pinterest - at risk for phishing and other attacks.

"Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system," wrote Svane, adding, "We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines."

Svane did not specifically cite Tumblr, Twitter and Pinterest, but support emails sent out from the companies informing users of the attack confirms that user data could have been compromised indirectly. While usernames and passwords were not compromised, the threat of individualized attacks aimed at gaining access to accounts and stealing personal information does exist.

Tumblr, for example, sent out emails stating the following: 

"The subject lines of your emails to Tumblr Support may have included the address of your blog which could potentially allow your blog to be unwillingly associated with your email address."

It went on to advise users to review any emails received from support, abuse, dmca, legal, enquiries or lawenforcement with a @tumblr.com tagged on the end. The fear is that hackers, equipped with people's email addresses and the issues they raised with specific departments at a service like Tumblr, could then phish users with a masked version of that same address.

Tumblr's support email ended with a warning along those very lines: "Tumblr will never ask you for your password by email. Emails are easy to fake, and you should be suspicious of unexpected emails you receive."

While it's not exactly comforting to know that you should be suspicious of any and all "unexpected emails," companies like Twitter are taking measures to ensure that the tools are in place to help flag these attacks if they do occur.

In a public announcement yesterday, Twitter said that it has been utilizing DMARC authenticaion technology  to help lessen the risk of users giving away personal information. Using established authentication protocols, DMARC gives email providers a way to block email from forged domains. "While this protocol is young, it has already gained a significant traction in the email community with all four major email providers - AOL, Gmail, Hotmail/Outlook, and Yahoo! Mail - already on board…" the post reads.

While its good to know that Twitter is addressing the hacker threat alongside its fellow social network giants, all these measures are merely reactionary moves following widespread breaches. The Zendesk hack makes it abundantly clear that we need more proactive security measures that include third-parties to keep these attacks from wreaking havoc. Until then, the hackers will keep succeeding, and users will pay the price. 

Microsoft's Socl social network, now open to all, is big, bright and beautiful. And perhaps just a bit too much of each.

Although Socl became available in May to students, Microsoft employees, and some VIPs, this week Microsoft opened up the site to the world at large. Socl still identifies itself as "beta.so.cl," perhaps indicating that it's not quite completed. But in a hands-on with the new site on Wednesday, I encountered no bugs, and every feature the site promised, it delivered.

The Casual Social Network

What is Socl? Think of it as a casual social network, like Pinterest, but more verbose. And with some elements of Google+ thrown in for good measure. Basically, Socl makes it extremely easy to share Web pages, images and videos you've found on the Web (with Microsoft's Bing search engine, of course), and even like them with a "Smile" icon. And while there's a dash of the "Metro-style" typography from Windows 8, it's neither obtrusive nor one of the primary design elements. Remember, Socl was originally designed by Fuse Labs, part of Microsoft's research arm.

Socl opens by asking you if you'd like to log in with your Facebook or Microsoft account. While there isn't an option to sign in with just a user name or password, Microsoft reassures you that the site will never post on your timeline without your permission. (I turned my Facebook privacy settings for the associated Socl app to "just me," just in case.) However, if you sign in via Microsoft, the Socl VNext app will view your name, email, gender and contact list, including the email addresses of your friends. That might seem a bit offputting, until you realize that many other social networks, including Google+, does the same.

A privacy page offers you the ability to control notifications, and erase all content from the system. But keep in mind - and for privacy nuts, this is paramount - what you post will be seen, at least for a few seconds, by the entire world, and who ever searches for it. Socl is far more consistent with Mark Zuckerberg's concept of "everything is shared" than Facebook is.

Right In The Thick Of It

After signing in, Socl drops you into the thick of it: the front page. As far as I can tell, every post made to the site ends up here, although just for a second or two: As you'll quickly notice, each post - dominated by a picture or pictures - takes up at least a third or half of the available space. Combine that with the frequency that others post, and your "Hello World!" introduction won't last long. Make it interesting enough, however, and you'll pick up your first Followers.

Yep, Followers.

Like Twitter, you can follow who you like, and a "People" page shows some of the most popular users, including those you've chosen to follow and those who follow you. At this early stage, there's a disproportionate number of Microsoft employees, but the looky-loos from the Internet at large may soon alleviate that. I was disappointed by the lack of an easy option to follow a user who had added an interesting post, however. I had to click into the post, then to the user's profile page, and then add him - not as convenient as I would have liked.

At this point, you'll probably feel overwhelmed. If so, it might be worth heading to the "Interests" tab, where you'll be able to narrow down your search. At the top of the page, picture-driven categories like "Tech" and "Music" appear, and you're always welcome to search for a topic using the small magnifying glass icon to the middle right.

When Is A Search Box Not A Search Box?

Microsoft made an odd choice by including what looks like a search box at the top of each page. It's not. Instead, typing in a topic there creates a post, using that word as the first search term.

And creating content is where Socl shines. Yes, Pinterest focuses on images as well. But creating a post on Socl takes just seconds: add a headline, search Bing for images, links or videos, and drag them over to the posting box. Microsoft and Fuse have put themselves on the cutting edge here, and Facebook feels old and tired by comparison.

Each photo layout is the same, however: one main image, with several smaller ones. Each picture will resize itself to fit in, with some dynamic reorganization in places to maintin the relative alignment and photo format. There's a limit, though, of about three small square photo icons, and about fifteen rows. While you can add movie links, clicking on the icon for the "Prometheus" trailer I added took me to the Yahoo page it was housed in, rather than playing the video directly from the page.

Parties Aren't Any Fun

If you want to share videos, "Parties" may be a better choice. At this point, "Parties" is a vague enough term that I suspect this tab will be beefed up in the future; I suspect it will eventually include Google Hangout-style video chats, powered by Microsoft's Skype.

For now, however, Parties is the place to loop videos, and where others can drop in to join them. But it doesn't work very well.

Instead of a collaborative, living-room feel, Parties feels like an art installation, where a film loop plays in a darkened room. People drop in, holding a virtual glass of champagne, mutter something about Bauhaus and butterflies, and depart. Even though Microsoft allows users to post images from Google's YouTube, the controls are gone: you can't pause, rewind, fast-forward or even put the video into a full-screen mode. It's nearly useless, especially for long-form content.

Socl's "Firehose" Makes It Worth A Visit

In general, Socl is worth a visit. If you understand that nothing you post on Socl is truly private, it's a bit of a rush. Yes, we'll probably see the spammers drop in. Some marginally risque photos have already surfaced, although users can flag such content as inappropriate. And each picture is too big; I'd like the option to shrink things down to a more pleasing size.

But Socl offers something that other social networks don't: the chance to ride the firehose. To be carried along by every user that publishes something to the system. Compare that with Quora, which absolutely refuses to let you in unless you sign up for the system, and then wants to provide you only with content your friends care about.

I hate that. I like to break free occasionally, to cast myself in the raging torrent of serendipity and encounter things I never knew existed. Will I be able to grab hold, and establish a clique of content providers like I have on Twitter? I don't know. But for right now, I'm enjoying the uncertainty.

Your social network has fallen from its 2006-era prime. You need to reposition yourself and regain the attention of users who have long since moved on. What do you do? Take a page from the Pinterest playbook.

This week is apparently the week to do exactly that. First, MySpace previewed its next iteration, which moves away from traditional profiles and social streams in favor of a grid-based layout showcasing media content shared by users. Sound familiar?

The very next day, StumbleUpon launched a beta redesign that also bears a visual similarity to Pinterest. 

MySpace and StumbleUpon aren't the first companies to take cues from Pinterest's design approach. The design of the explosively popular social scrapbooking service has been widely mimicked in recent months. Its tiled layout, based on the widely-used Masonry jQuery layout plugin, has begat countless Wordpress and Tumblr themes.

Sites using this visual approach are too numerous to name. StumbleUpon and MySpace stand out because they are both once-beloved social networks from a half decade ago that have declined in usership and relevance. Meanwhile, Pinterest has become the latest social media phenomenon, even as many in the broad public struggle to understand why on Earth they should use it. It's hard to say how long Pinterest's growth will last or whether it will find a viable business model, but for now its success has given other contenders in the social space something to emulate, sometimes shamelessly.

Take Chill, for example. The social video-sharing service originally sprang out of the group-listening hype generated last summer by music startup Turntable.fm. In early 2012, the company shifted its focus from real-time group video watching and content discovery. Today, Chill bears a striking resemblance to Pinterest, from its Masonry-style layout to the placement of its dark pink, handwritten-looking logo. 

People are ripping off Pinterest's design for one simple reason: it works. In 30 months (much of which was a closed beta period), the service's subscriber list has ballooned to more than 20 million users who have generated 1.9 billion monthly page views and spend an average of about 15 minutes pinning and browsing. In terms of registered users, that's not quite Instagram-level growth, but it's still remarkable. 

A feature in the September issue of Fast Company explains the origin of Pinterest's design: 

As they sketched out Pinterest, [cofounders] Silberman and Sharp cast aside many then-predominant orthodoxies of Web design. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and many other content-driven websites were organized around "feeds," lines of text or images that ran from top to bottom by time… The idea was to remove the rigid organizational strictures that the Web imposed - directories, timestamps, pagination - and replace them with a grid of images that would feel more like visiting a store or a museum. 

The result was what we see on Pinterest today: pleasing images of attractive people, delicious-looking confections, stylish accessories and awe-inspiring scenes laid out on a fixed-width grid with no bottom. That infinite scroll is part of what makes Pinterest so addictive - and helps boost the coveted time-on-site metric. 

Unlike most hot social startups, Pinterest even has the beginnings of a non-advertising-based business model within reach. The service is already driving tons of traffic to online retailers as its users lust after many of the products pinned there. The company is not officially implementing any particular monetization strategy yet, but many of the components of one are sitting there waiting to be picked up and built into a cash cow. 

Of course, half of that potential future equation is a massive user base, which Pinterest has. Other sites can borrow from its design all they want, but whether or not they can win over users on such an immense scale is another story altogether. 

Pinterest is quickly finding its way into the social strategies of media organizations large and small, even as the company itself is still figuring out its business model. Here's how they're using the virtual scrapbooking service. (Part 2 of a 4-part series on how journalists are using social networks beyond Facebook and Twitter.)

For a publisher, Pinterest's chief advantages are twofold. First, it engages readers in a new context, one that is uniquely visual. It also turns out to have big potential in the traffic-driving department. 

See also: How Journalists Are Using Instagram

Like more established social networks, Pinterest is used to share links to articles, photos, and other content. It's somewhat like Twitter or Facebook in this respect, but laid out and categorized differently. Since it's heavily visual, Pinterest works best for content that has compelling imagery, be it photography, illustrations or the occasional infographic. Integration with services like SoundCloud and Vimeo make Pinterest a good fit for sharing audio and video as well. 

Pinterest has been flooded with recipes and other food-related images. Any publication that has covers food would be right at home there. Pennsylvania-based Smart Magazine has seized the opportunity, using Pinterest to promote their recipes and restaurant reviews. 

Contrary to its early reputation, Pinterest is about much more than dessert porn and wedding plans. It can be used to curate content about a wide range of subjects, as evidenced by NPR's account. The public radio network pins plenty of its food coverage, but also delves into music, books, technology and health. Branching off the from main NPR account, NPRMusic has its own presence on Pinterest, where music reviews, in-studio performances and artist interviews are presented in an eye-catching array of pinboards. The Guardian's Pinterest profile is similarly broad, spanning multiple categories and coverage areas. Some boards are inexplicably sparse (only three pins on the Olympics board?), while others are richly populated (97 July 4th pies!). 

Al Jazeera eschews such broad strokes in favor of granular, topic-specific boards. Sure, they link to their own coverage of stories like the Joseph Kony controversy and Egypt's democratic transition,  but they also solicit audience feedback via their Crowdsourced News pinboard, which is open to submissions from viewers and readers. Al Jazeera's social prowess is on display in The Stream, a deeply interactive, Web-fueled show that maintains its own separate Pinterest account. 

In addition to promoting and crowdsourcing stories, newsroom use Pinterest to hold contests. These promotions let publications resurface content from their archives or enhance coverage of local or topical niches.  

Part 1: How Journaists Are Using Instagram

Part 2: How Journalists Are Using Pinterest

Part 3: How Journalists Are Using Google+ 

Part 4: How Journalists Are Using SoundCloud

Pinterest is steadily growing out of the stereotype that it's just for sharing recipes and planning weddings. The social scrapbook already plays a central role in the social media strategies of visual artists, publishers and certain types of businesses. Now, with the addition of features for pinning music and video, musicians are catching on. 

Just as early-adopter bands and artists flocked to Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram, some are experimenting with visual bookmarking on Pinterest. Conventions are emerging as those brave enough to dive in head-first experiment with different approaches. 

The most obvious way musicians are using Pinterest is as a collection of visual artifacts from across the Web. This includes everything from photos of recent gigs, artists they admire or gear they love playing with to visual art that matches their music. This approach is akin to the way bands have used Tumblr.

Alanis Morissette uses Pinterest both as a promotional vehicle for her own work and as a way to connect with fans in a more meaningful way. That includes not only a scrapbook of personal photos but also a pinboard dedicated to sharing favorite quotes and a board titled "Alanis Recommends" containing mostly self-help books. These features add a personal flavor to her social media presence, something Pinterest is uniquely positioned to help facilitate.  

Beyond Pictures: Sound and Video

Despite its roots, Pinterest is no longer just about imagery. It also happens to be a good way to share sounds and videos, a fact that makes it increasingly appealing to musicians looking to promote their work. Music videos from sources like YouTube, Vimeo and others can be embedded directly into Pinterest pages and, not unlike Twitter or Tumblr, can be "repinned" by others, creating the potential for content to go viral. 

Last week, the site officially integrated with SoundCloud, a partnership that makes Pinterest an even more natural fit for bands and musicians. Until now, the most effective way to share a song on Pinterest was to pin a YouTube video containing the track. This new feature simplifies things a bit and provides an additional avenue for distributing audio files. 

Yoko Ono was quick to take advantage of SoundCloud support. The artist and wife of the late John Lennon uses the feature to embed new songs as well as audio clips from radio appearances. The "SoundCloud" board on Ono's account includes everything from music recorded with her late husband to a recent episode of a radio program on which Ono appeared with her son Sean Lennon. Her Pinterest account also serves as a home to past visual art projects, writings and activism-related links. 

Music outlets like The Fader, HypeBot, VH1 and MTV have also jumped on the Pinterest stage. Record labels are also using the service to promote artists and new releases. Many labels create boards specific to popular artists in their roster, effectively giving those artists a semi-official presence on the site without requiring them to manage it. This approach offers less opportunity for deep engagement with fans, but it's a start. 

Success Is Hard to Measure

As popular as Pinterest is becoming generally, for musicians it's still a realm of early adopters. Relatively few artists have official accounts on the site. Even Amanda Palmer, who is often noted for effective use of Twitter and other social platforms, hasn't pinned anything. 

How can an artist know whether Pinterest is paying off? Success can be difficult to gauge. Certainly, artists with a large following on Pinterest should expect to see an increase in video views, listens and click-throughs to related media and articles. For smaller acts, the payoff may not be as dramatic at first. In either case, metrics don't exist that would help artists and managers determine the effectiveness of a particular strategy. Did pinning those new tracks from SoundCloud help get them heard by more people? Maybe, but neither SoundCloud nor Pinterest offers analytics granular enough to know for sure. 

Pinterest doesn't yet have a huge community of bands and musicians, but features like SoundCloud integration will likely encourage more to take advantage of the service. What it does have is a sizable - and growing - user base, something artists would be wise to tap into early. 

There's been a lot of talk in the tech community that Pinterest has changed the popular art of scrapbooking. Internet analyst Mary Meeker even suggested that Pinterest had reimagined scrapbooking. But after looking at how two scrapbooking gurus are using Pinterest, our conclusion is that the lucrative scrapbook market is still ripe for reinvention in the mobile and social era.

Scrapbooking is a popular hobby in the United States and has a long history. Wikipedia defines it as "a method for preserving personal and family history in the form of a scrapbook." Scrapbooks typically include photos, journal entries, clippings from newspapers and magazines, and artwork. As Mary Meeker noted in her presentation, the tools of scrapbooking have traditionally been paper, scissors and glue.

Over the past year Pinterest has had an impact on the scrapbooking community, but not as much as we've been led to believe. In this post we profile a couple of leading "scrappers" (as I discovered they are known as), to see how they use Pinterest.

The Family Scrapbooker: My Sister-in-Law

It turns out I have an avid scrapbooker in my family, in the form of my sister-in-law. She told me that lots of "the American scrappers" are on Pinterest and a lot people follow them there. Many of the bigger names in scrapbooking have blogs, along with Facebook and Twitter profiles. She said this allows fans to follow popular scrappers on social media, "rather than waiting a year or two for them to bring out a new book."

According to my scrapbooking sister-in-law, many scrappers use Pinterest to keep track of art works, color schemes, home decor, ideas and other people's layouts (scrapbook pages).

Now let's look at a couple of prominent scrapbookers and how they use Pinterest.

The Traditional Scrapbooker: Stacy Julian

Stacy Julian is a guru in the scrapbooking world. A mother of five from Spokane, Washington, Julian has written four books on scrapbooking, the first in 2000. She was the founding editor of Simple Scrapbooks magazine, which ran from 2002-2009.

Julian went on to found Big Picture Classes, an online education site for creative women. The company encourages its students "to use materials they have on hand or materials that can be acquired in their local economy." So scrapbooking is viewed as a physical craft by Stacy Julian and her education website.

Stacy Julian has over 7,000 followers on Pinterest. She's pinned 640 images, across 26 boards. She uses Pinterest mainly for inspiration, with her most popular board 'Happy Colors' being a place to "visit when I'm tired and need to find my mojo." Color is an important part of her scrapbooking philosophy, but the emphasis is still on deploying colorful materials on paper - rather than online. So Pinterest is a complementary activity for Stacy Julian, it hasn't replaced scrapbooking for her.

The Digital Scrapbooker: Ali Edwards

Ali Edwards has also written four books about scrapbooking (the first in 2004) and currently designs "digital scrapbooking products" for Designer Digitals. She has a foot in both camps of scrapbooking, paper and digital. She advises new scrapbookers that the best way to begin is to start writing and photographing, then "[bring] them together on your computer or with paper and glue."

So-called digital scrapbooking is relatively new. The key tools are scanners, image editors like Adobe Photoshop, and specialist tools like the Silhouette (an electronic cutting tool that connects to your computer). Edwards designs templates and kits, containing things like PNG files and .STUDIO files for use with the Silhouette.

Even though Stacy Julian is the more established scrapbooker, Edwards has more followers on Pinterest: 16,500 compared to 7,000 for Julian. That's really the only statistical difference between the two on Pinterest, however, because Edwards has pinned 652 images (Julian has 640), across 29 boards (Julian has 26).

Edwards' most pinned board is one called Memory Keeping. Many of these pins are about layout inspiration and ideas.

Scrapbooking Reimagined? Nope

Despite the different scrapbooking approaches of the two gurus, neither Stacy Julian or Ali Edwards use Pinterest as a replacement for scrapbooking. Both use Pinterest primarily for inspiration and to catalog ideas. At best, Pinterest gives scrappers a community to share ideas and inspirations. But it isn't reimagining scrapbooking.

However, there does seem to be a big opportunity in the market for a more social and mobile form of scrapbooking. Although Ali Edwards and others are beginning to push digital forms of scrapbooking, this is currently more about digital manipulation of images than a true Web native form of scrapbooking.

Perhaps I'm being presumptuous suggesting that scrapbooking can be even more digital, so I'd love to hear the thoughts of scrappers in the comments.

Image credit: gluestickgirl

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then it's no wonder that Pinterest is growing faster than Facebook and Twitter at the same point in their histories. It’s not just Pinterest's incredibly fast growth, however, that makes it fascinating. While the most popular users on Facebook and Twitter are celebrities and consumer brands, Pinterest is about ordinary people who have extraordinary passion. Here, then, is a list of Pinterest's homegrown superstars.

20. Joy Cho / Oh Joy! 812,026 followers Joy curates over 50 boards, but her most popular ones share fashion and home goods for the whimsical woman. And just in case that’s not playful enough, there’s also one dedicated entirely to balloons.

19. Leah Dent 833,455 followers Leah’s boards are all made up of two ideas.” For example, “halls and stairs,” “ingest and imbibe” and “shin and dig.”

18. Satsuki Shibuya 885,195 followers A self-described designer/creator/explorer, Satsuki Shibuya’s boards range from typography she loves to sleek housewares.

17. Ieva Mazeikaite 910,947 followers A freelance interior designer, she posts pretty kitchens, lovely bathrooms, and fireplaces and pretty shoes.

16. Jonathan Lo 899,258 followers Jonathan’s “Personal Stylin” board features men’s clothing and accessories that look like they’re straight from the pages of GQ.

15. Pennyweight 910,098 followers Pennyweight, who loves “pretty fashion, wonderful tunes and Mexican food,” shares her favorite ideas for everything from 9-to-5 (work) and beyond (parties and vacations).

14. Kate @ Wit + Delight 719,612 followers A designer and blogger, Kate is “currently obsessed” with almost a thousand sweaters, dresses, vests, shoes, accessories and more. P.S. She really likes stripes.

13. Rashida Coleman-Hale 924,959 followers A fabric designer, Rashida’s boards include “fabulous tutorials,” colorful and inspiring photographs, and an entire board about her favorite fabric: linen.

12. Justina Blakeney 984,690 followers Like many of the people on Pinterest, Justina is both a designer and a blogger; however, she is also a “mover & shaker, newlywed, mom-to-be, and jungalow-dweller.” This is reflected in her boards that show off her love of bohemian style for both the closet and home.

11. Christine Martinez 984,722 followers Christine’s “penchant for pretty” inspires with “Words to Live By” and dreamy interiors.

10. Ez Pudewa 1,034,530 followers It’s the little details that inspire Ez Pudewa. Unique gift wrap, unexpected home décor and holiday ideas make up just a few of her 58 boards.

9. Bright.Bazaar 1,053,421 followers Crafting, fashion (for him and for her), interiors, food, flowers and weddings, this color-obsessed blogger’s boards have something for everyone.

8. Michael Wurm, Jr. 1,074,095 Anyone with a sweet tooth will swoon over Michael’s “i bake” board. His “i cook” board looks pretty delicious, too. Bacon Guacamole Grilled Cheese Sandwich? Yes, please.

7. Daniel Bear Hunley 1,332,726 followers Style for the Southern gentleman. Daniel Bear Hunley’s boards include masculine prints, style, home goods, packaging and more. Oh, and his “Ferocious Animals” will make you squeal with delight. In a supremely manly way, of course.

6. Anna H. 1,364,886 followers Thirty-nine boards and 3300 pins featuring textiles, clothing and design inspiration. All organized by room.

5. Caitlin Cawley 1,399,662 followers Inspiring homes, closets and street style make this Boston-based graphic design major one of the most followed people on Pinterest.

4. Mike D 1,444,858 followers Obscure design, gorgeous cartography, distinct illustrations and general “awesomeness.”

3. Maia McDonald 1,480,006 followers A self-proclaimed “visual nerd,” Maia McDonald’s boards represent her affinity for painted portraits, romantic weddings and adorable babies. It’s also worth noting that she’s a creative coordinator for Williams-Sonoma.

2. Jennifer Chong 1,761,890 followers “Graphic designer, food lover, photography enthusiast, traveler” says it all about this Long Beach, California, pinner with over 1.65 million followers.

1. Jane Wang 2,982,983 followers Jane Wang is the single-most-followed user on Pinterest. Her quirky and frequent pins have earned her almost 3 million followers. Well, that and the fact that her son is a co-founder of the company.

Pinterest, which has grown quickly in 2012 to be the third largest U.S. social network behind Facebook and Twitter, is a service where people can “pin” photos and interesting Web artifacts to a digital board to share with their friends and online community. It is known to be popular among women on the Web and has gained several celebrity users, including Reese Witherspoon. 

Rakuten is one of the top Internet companies in the world. Its flagship website is Rakuten Ichiba, an e-commerce platform that is the largest in Japan and one of the largest in the world. It owns various worldwide properties including Buy.com in the U.S., Priceminister in France, Ikeda in Brazil and Play.com in the United Kingdom. 

“While some may see e-commerce as a straightforward vending machine-like experience, we believe it is a living process where both retailers and consumers can communicate, discover, and curate to make the experience more entertaining. We see tremendous synergies between Pinterest’s vision and Rakuten’s model for e-commerce. Rakuten looks forward to introducing Pinterest to the Japanese market as well as other markets around the world,” said Rakuten CEO Hiroshi “Micky” Mikitani in a press release. 

"Initially, the partnership with Rakuten will help support Pinterest's global expansion," said Neel Grover, CEO of Rakuten's Buy.com. "Rakuten's global investment in e-commerce is illustrated by a presence in 17 countries and regions through 13 group companies. Longer term, there are a number of opportunities for meaningful partnerships between the two companies, as there are tremendous synergies between Pinterest's vision and our model for e-commerce where both retailers and consumers are more social, interactive and empowered."

According to the technology blog AllThingsD, Pinterest CEO and cofounder Ben Silbermann was looking for a “global strategic investor” that can help the company grow internationally and help stave off foreign clones. There were no U.S. institutional investors and, “that is the way Pinterest’s quirky leadership wanted it,” according to AllThingsD. 

Pinterest had raised about $37.5 million through its Series A, Series B and angel rounds before the large investment from Rakuten. Its previous funding came from large VC firms and individual investors such as Jack Abraham, Ron Conway, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital. 

The future of Pinterest is likely tied to e-commerce in one fashion or another. With its high percentage of women users and focus on the “interest graph,” Pinterest is in the perfect position to become a recommendation engine for both online and offline purchases. In this regard, Rakuten is a perfect partner for Pinterest in that the social bookmarking site can help drive interest in Rakuten’s digital e-commerce properties. 

“Our goal is to help people discover things they love, by connecting people through their shared interests. Bringing Rakuten on board gives us an amazing opportunity to move a step closer to this goal,” said Silbermann in a press release. 

Like most things on the Internet, Pinstagram happened fast.

"We were joking one evening about how Instagram is worth $1 billion and how Pinterest's valuation might already be in the $500 million range," says co-founder Brandon Leonardo. "And we were thinking about the idea of a Twitter for Facebook, what that would be like. Then I could tell Pek started thinking about it. The gears started turning; he was visualizing a Pinterest for Instagram."

Not more than 24 hours later, Pongpaet had already coded and designed it. This sort of fast turnaround is pretty natural for Pongpaet and Leonardo, who come from a hackathon "get stuff out as fast as possible and ask questions later" type of background.

If this sort of idea had popped up within a larger company setting, for example, it would have "taken months," says Pongapaet.

Since Pinstagram's debut just a few weeks ago, the site has already seen about 6,400 Facebook likes of Instagram images, thousands of tweets and a few hundred pins.

Pinstagram: An Indicator of the Evolving Visual Web

Services like Pinterest and Instagram are integral to the future of the visual Web. No longer do people send photos to document memories; they are lifestreaming as it all happens, with pictures telling the story. It's no wonder that Facebook snatched up Instagram while it still had the chance. 

"The visual medium has always had international appeal," says Pongapaet. "Sending pictures is very common. If you stick to English, you'll alienate a lot of people. Visual mediums let you transcend all barriers. It takes seconds to process a photo."

What about Webstagram, the Instagram Web viewer? Isn't this a sufficient way to view Instragram images on the Internet? For some, it's perfect. But like many news Web sites, Webstagram is organized around "popular," "my photos," "liked," "hot," "photo of the day" and more. It feels more like a news website and less like a glossy, Pinterest-like magazine.

"The reason I built Pinstagram is because this is my world view of how Instagram should look on the Web," says Pongapaet. "Our core focus is to recreate the Instagram experience on the desktop and to be able to extend that to our users."

Not everyone wants to see their Instagrams in a Pinterest-like layout, however, and Pongapaet acknowledges that.

"There are always different interpretations," he says. "That's what great about art, about having different APIs - people all have different interpretations."

Pinstagram just integrated into Facebook Timeline. As the Instagram-Facebook integration continues to rollout, so will this nifty Pinterest-Instagram hybrid beast.

Last time we checked, Pinterest was a site mostly full of women pinning away images of wedding planning and home decor. The site is in fact about 80% women, according to data from Google Ad Planner. But there are still a few dudes on the site. User Mike Dew, aka tempspaz, is the most-followed guy on Pinterest. ReadWriteWeb tracked him down via some search sleuthing and asked him a few questions about what it's like being the most-followed guy on the Internet's new social-network darling. Mike joined the site in October 2010, meaning that he didn't even read A Guy's Guide to Pinterest before becoming a pinner.

Mike Dew is a Philadelphia-based, Cincinnati-born graphic designer. On Pinterest, he just goes by Mike D. His profile pic shows his faded red Cincinnati Reds cap, eyes, eyebrows and nose. Mike currently has 16 boards, ranging from design to sustenance to threads. He is only following 62 people. A total of 1,331,092 people currently follow him. 

Strangely, Mike says he found out about his immense amount of followers accidentally. When we chatted on the phone, he didn't come off as a kind of Twitter social-media marketing guru type. Rather, he's just a pretty cool guy with an awesome eye for design. He is a tastemaker, and his platform is Pinterest. 

"Over the winter, things just kind of took off," he tells ReadWriteWeb. "Someone I work with DM'ed me the Mashable article of top 15 Pinterest users. I saw it and thought 'That's pretty crazy!' "

Pinterest and the Social Media Celebrity

Celebrities are made on social media. Or, rather, social-media celebrities are made on social media.

"It's just a website, so it's not like I'm a celebrity," Dew says. "It's hard to know how great of a reach I actually do have. I've been doing the same thing on Pinterest for the last year and a half or so, and there's just a different number on my Pinterest page."

He also doesn't really have any idea how all this happened. 

"I started noticing that I was getting a lot of followers over Christmas time," he says. "I had about 300 or so in October 2011. Then I went home to Cincinnati over the holidays, and when I came back I had 150,000 followers. I asked my friends if the same thing had happened to them, and they said no, it hadn't, and they didn't know what this was about."

By late March, when the Mashable top pinner dudes article came out, Dew says he had accumulated about 600,000 followers.

"And from there it was just like boom, boom - 500,000, then 750,000, and then I hit 1 million."

But what does it all mean? Dew tells us that he didn't bother to contact Pinterest to figure out how this happened or even why. In the meantime, he says that his Pinterest popularity has helped him gain some freelance design work, but nothing that he would describe as "weird" or "over-the-top." He has also pinned a few things for friends, to help them get additional exposure.

Dew is not new to using the Internet for cataloging imagery that he finds inspiring or interesting.

"Over the years, I have had all these different blogs and inspiration sites that I would go to," he says. "Stuff would pop up, and there was never a good way to catalog stuff that I wanted to save. When Pinterest came around, that was perfect."

Even though his focus is design, he does say that having a lot of interior design and travel imagery has helped him take off. 

"A nice picture of Japan gets around," he says. "Or, that's a nice picture of a kitchen - and I really do like to cook. So that might have a little bit to do with why I have a lot of people following me. Everyone likes beautiful pictures of food."

Dew is a considerate pinner, only pinning images once or twice a day. He is polite and not interested in filling his followers' streams with too much stuff.

"Some people I follow fill up my news feed and it gets irritating," he says. "I don't want to overload people with too much stuff."

Pinterest or Facebook? Why Not Both?

For visually oriented folks, such as artists, designers, chefs and those with good taste, Pinterest is a haven of images. It complements the already visual nature of Facebook - yet, on Pinterest, it's hard to have a full-fledged conversation about images. Plus, Facebook is still a very personal space; at least, it is for Dew.

"Keeping Facebook private for me is still important," says Dew. "People find me from Pinterest, but I don't accept those friend requests. If I don't know you and you don't know me, why be friends on Facebook?"

Will Pinterest eclipse Facebook? Or are Facebook and Pinterest fraternal twins of some sort?

"As long as there are people like me, Pinterest will have an audience or a user base," Dew says. "It might not eclipse Facebook, but it will be a Web standard like Google and Facebook. I think Pinterest could be on that level."

Pinterest has problems with attribution. It's a casual site, and its users are casual about attribution of the images they pin. Outcry from publishers forced Pinterest to let them opt out by including code, and in February, Flickr confirmed that it had included the code for all copyrighted, nonpublic and non-"safe" pages.

Flickr is one of the top sources for Pinterest images, so this was a stern stance toward Pinterest. Today's announcement smoothes that over. By pinning Flickr photos the easiest way, Pinterest users will automatically bring along proper attribution. Other publishers will surely follow suit.

For Flickr, this arrangement integrates the well-established photo site with the hot new social network of the day, but it does so in a way that preserves Flickr's community and context. "We believe that the photo is about a lot more than the image," a Flickr representative tells ReadWriteWeb. "It's about the title, tag and description, and helps build the community that we have."

Flickr's users agree. "Flickr's strength is in groups/communities," photographer Aaron Hockley told ReadWriteWeb. Tecca senior editor Taylor Hatmaker agreed that the community "is arguably still Flickr's greatest strength." Now that Pinterest's sharing agreement respects Flickr's community guidelines implicitly, the two services can start over on the right foot.

See also: What Is the Point of... Pinterest?

"PINTEREST: Can financial services firms use this new platform effectively?" That was the subject line of an email in my inbox this morning. It came from Corporate Insight, a financial services consulting firm. The email went on to note that "Pinterest values imagery over text and incorporates many social aspects of Twitter and Facebook to connect users and spread content." While admitting that "no financial services firm uses Pinterest today," nevertheless Corporate Insight thinks that financial institutions should have a presence on Pinterest.

At first I scoffed at this: a financial services firm on Pinterest!? But on reflection, we are in an online world that is increasingly visual. So why shouldn't a financial services firm use one of the leading image-based social networks?

Tumblr was probably the first social media service to exploit the Visual Web trend on a mass scale, but it's been Pinterest that has captured the public imagination in 2012. Pinterest is a place to store and share images (and videos, although that is a much less used feature of the site).

Corporate Insight offers seven reasons why a financial services firm should utilize Pinterest:

1. Retirement: Interactive, image-centric retirement marketing campaigns could transition nicely onto Pinterest. Prudential’s Day One Stories microsite is a great example of this.
2. Savings and investment goals: Posting photos of savings and investment goals is an easy way to engage your audience on Pinterest.
3. Credit card rewards: Pinboards can be used to showcase credit card reward options, from merchandise to travel, and firms can encourage members to post photos of different items and experiences they’ve redeemed with their points.
4. Lifestyle: Credit card firms can post photos from sponsored events such as concerts, sports games, and other partner venues. American Express currently does this on other social media platforms and these campaigns can easily be converted to Pinterest.
5. Corporate Mascots: Corporate mascots are a significant part of some financial services firms’ identities. Dedicated corporate mascot pinboards are a great way to feature proprietary imagery detailing the mascot’s activities.
6. Contests: Holding contests or sweepstakes via Pinterest is an effective way to gauge public sentiment. For example, followers may vote on preferred reward items by “liking” or “repinning” an image.
7. Charitable Giving: Philanthropy is a staple at financial institutions and pinboards can be used to highlight firms’ various charitable initiatives. This could include images of the charitable organizations or action shots of employees volunteering. As a way to engage with followers, firms could encourage them to post pictures of charities that they support.

If you look at Prudential's Day One Stories advertising campaign, as Corporate Insight suggested, it is indeed focused on imagery and multimedia. Its microsite is a giant wall of photos, in fact. Extending that microsite to Pinterest makes a lot of sense.

Also look at American Express' Facebook page. As Corporate Insight points out, it features content from their sponsored events. Much of that is images and video. It makes a whole lot of sense to put that on Pinterest, too.

There's still a place, of course, for text-based Web content. This blog and many other news publications attest to that. But to get attention on the Web these days, increasingly it is key to use images and video.

People have relatively short attention spans on the Web, especially since many of us carry around smartphones and tablets everywhere we go. Maybe you only have a few minutes to browse content, while waiting in line at a cafe or during the adverts of a TV show. Browsing images is a nifty use of your time in those instances; which goes a long way to explaining the popularity of Pinterest this year. 

It also explains why Prudential and American Express should start using Pinterest, if they want a better chance of attracting the attention of potential customers.

Take PinAQuote.com, for example. It is a site that allows users to grab a quote from somewhere on the Web, and quickly pin it to Pinterest. Or PinCat, a site which lets you choose from many lovely cat photos, pinning them to Pinterest. Of course, you can Instagram or tweet that kitty, but it's just not as exciting as pinning it. Why would you give a cat a bird when you could pin it up, like a pin-up girl?

Yet for all the lovely cats on the Internet, users aren't satisfied just looking at furballs. They want balls, they want boobs. And just as there are plenty of boobs on Facebook and spambots on Twitter, there was bound to be a porn-irific knockoff of Pinterest. Pornterest is what we all thought it would be called. But that's not what happened.

Snatchly.com calls itself the "Pinterest for Porn." Just as Pinterest offers a "pin it" button for your browser, Snatchly.com offers a "snatch it" button, which helps users grab an image or video, and quickly pin it.

Like Pinterest, Snatchly is not a producer of the content found on the site. Furthermore, it requires all users to identify where they found the images they pin. It requires users to be at least 18 years old in order to upload images and videos, and that person must verify that the models in the images are at least 18 years of age, as well.

This reminds me of IsAnyoneUp.com, the site for anonymously publishing nude photos. Users submit images of themselves, their friends and people they know, not always with their consent. This makes IsAnyoneUp.com a site of contention for many - and owner Hunter Moore has received plenty of flak for making money off of other peoples' nudie pics.

What of copyright issues? Do Internet users who are busy watching animated GIFs of porn have more than three seconds of thought about a copyrighted image? Snatchly says that in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, it will "respond expeditiously to claims of copyright infringement committed using the Snatchly website." So if your private parts end up on Snatchly, just write and let them know.

"If a user owns the material in question, we will remove it," says Snatchly's Neil Notts. "If they don't own the material but can make a reasonable claim that it is in fact them, we may be willing to contact the owner on their behalf and request removal." He adds: "We are very sensitive to concerns of material posted on Snatchly."

The act of "pinning" offers social media users yet another way to indicate a tiny amount of interaction, one that is even more effortless than a Facebook like or a Twitter tweet. It is a "pin," a momentary click and reshare, a return to the ease of the pin-up image, which can come from any variety of mediums - magazines, newspapers, postcards or even lithographs. Today the pin-up re-emerges, thanks to Pinterest and knockoffs like it.

Lead image via Flickr. Cat image via PinCat.

Laura Paine has a simple answer when asked why Pinterest exploded in popularity at this particular juncture in Internet history. The former reporter watched her newspaper cut positions, go from being a daily to a weekly and focus more on creating short, Q&A pieces, video and photo galleries in an effort to cling to dwindling online traffic.

"People aren't really reading anymore," said Paine, who now works for the public relations firm InkHouse.

A new Engauge white paper breaks down the make-up of the average Pinterest user and shows that the end result of less reading is more of a focus on content curation than creation. The timing of that trend, combined with a stunning design when Internet users are focusing more on visual than text, has allowed Pinterest to explode in popularity.

"Creation takes a lot of time where curation takes just seconds," Paine said. "Pinterest allows us all to be thought leaders on fashion, food and travel destinations without needing to do the research ourselves."

Or, as the white paper puts it, "People stare into a fire hose of information every day, and it's having an impact. They're actively seeking ways to not only filter and organize what they find, but also to less stressfully consume more content. That is the behavior Pinterest exploits."

Source: Engauge

Show Me Don't Tell Me

Prior to Pinterest, if we weren't creating content ourselves, we were more likely to share articles and videos. Pinterest has quickly changed that, according to Heather Sundell, marketing manager at the Search Agency.

"I think Pinterest hit that perfect pitch, so often difficult to achieve: Right place, right time," she said. "As sharing started to become synonymous with search, and consumers were finding it easier than ever to make online discoveries with the power of shared content, Pinterest was there with a novelty."

Visual content also has an advantage over written content. Dale's Cone of Experience, a model that illustrates several theories of instructional design and the learning process, says that we only remember 10% of what we read, but 30% of what we see.

"Most popular search mechanisms are heavily textual and fail to ignite the stimuli that drive action," said Nathaniel Perez of the marketing firm SapientNitro. "While one can argue that Facebook, Tumblr, even blogs are also visual content vehicles, they very hardly support serendipity."

Look Out, Google

Pinterest has been called a threat to Web giants as big as Facebook. But Perez suggests its more visually appealing display may eventually make it a player in the search space as well. And thee's anecdotal evidence to bear him out.

Karah Street, an account director for Stratacomm, says Pinterest has been an alway-open browser tab since she started using the site in July. Meanwhile, her Facebook usage has decreased as her Pinterest use has increased.

"From my perspective, Pinterest has gained popularity because it allows us to do the opposite of what we've been told to do with social media. Pinterest is less about engagement with people you know and more about discovery and idea curation," she said. "The pins you see are customized and pushed out based on self-identified interests...When I'm looking for new trends on specific topics like fashion or birthday party themes, I now search Pinterest first -- not Google."

Source: Engauge

New Wrapper For An Old Idea

Pinterest isn't doing anything new - it's just doing it better. In interviews with marketing and design experts Wednesday, there were frequent comparisons to Tumblr and other Web sites that emphasize sharing and curating content.

Jake Gold, co-founder of Get.com, said in his view, Pinterest reminds him of Reddit.

"People use them in exactly the same way: to alleviate boredom and get little dopamine jolts," he said. Pinterest is "an optimized, focused, and viral version of Reddit. It's probably what Reddit would look like if it hadn't stagnated for 5 years."

"Just Seems Easier"

Heather Whaling of Geben Communication used Evernote, email notes and bookmarks to save Web pages and other content she wanted to save before she discovered Pinterest.

"But I'd rarely go back and look for it. Pinterest just seems easier to currate and collect helpful links and ideas," she said.

Source: Engauge

Pinterest scams are different from Facebook's in two ways. "Pinterest is a new platform that users may have less sophistication in understanding what looks legitimate, and what looks like a scam, since they haven't had much exposure to the platform," says ESET Security Researcher Cameron Camp. "Second, Pinterest hasn't had the time to backfill protections for the user, unlike some of the other social media platforms, so there is a window where scammers can be effective before they put controls in place."

Not surprisingly, similar phishing scams have been popping up on Facebook for years. One such Starbucks scam happened last year on the 40th anniversary. It was a giveaway scam, encouraging users to share the supposed prize with their friends.

Pinterest might just be the best place to post image-oriented giftcard scams. They blend right in with other images on Pinterest, making it harder to differentiate the true from the false. Search for "Starbucks" on Pinterest, and you're sure to find plenty of coffee-related images. Just as on Facebook, there are plenty of Starbucks-loving Pinterest users.

TrendMicro blog posted this Starbucks phishing scam, which has been appearing on Pinterest. If the user clicks on the Starbucks giftcard image, they will be redirected to a website that asks them to please repin the images. After doing so, they're asked to click a link, which sends them to a scam site.

Aside from just not clicking, how can users avoid getting caught in Pinterest scams? "Users should complain to Pinterest, and request that controls be put in place to stop the scammers," says Camp. "Pinterest has shown some interest in stopping other types of scams, with things like the opt-out code to restrict content sharing from certain sites, so apparently they're responding."

Users beware.

"I saw people are starting to post a lot of quirky quotes, so I thought why can't I just highlight some text and just convert it?" Rotman asked himself. "So I put together a little bookmarklet that basically does that. It works the same way as the 'Pin It' button."

The PinAQuote bookmarklets bar installs right into your browser. Go to any website, select the text, and drop it onto Pinterest. You've just created your very own sharable text image.

As with any potentially super sharable text-only image, however, if you want it to share it needs to be more than just something random that you thought looked cool. If you're more interested in using Pinterest as a space for gathering your ideas rather than finding potentially viral images, then go ahead and Pin-a-quote away. You can also just create your own text. For now there aren't any font options aside from the default.

Right now PinAQuote does not offer anything more than plain text, which might be the best option for what should be a plain, simplistic site full of beautiful imagery. In that case, the less poster-like PinAQuote gets, the better. At least, that's how designer Justin Kemerling envisions it.

"On Facebook, there's image supporting - but it's all about the context, the story," says Kemerling. "On Pinterest, the image is the focal point and the story, so the quality of images on your Pinterest stream is better than anywhere on the Internet."

Rotman thinks he might start adding more options to PinAQuote.com, which would alter this currently barebones-feeling site. He might let people choose the font and the color. And then he might let people go a bit wild.

"Maybe if I want to get crazy with it, people can upload a background image and then put the text on top of it, which kinda turns it into a meme generator," he says.

"The idea is that by default, your information is shared between Facebook and Pinterest," says Security Researcher Cameron Camp. "It is semi-opaque as to what information Pinterest pulls from your Facebook."

There are three key places to keep an eye on, namely Pinterest Settings, Facebook-Pinterest authorization and Twitter-Pinterest authorization. Let's take a look.

Pinterest Settings: Click on this button, which is located in the upper righthand corner of your Pinterest profile, and you'll land on what initially appears to be just your Pinterest profile page. Here you can decide how you want to appear to your Pinterest followers through the usual profile settings (first name, last name, username, about, website, location). Keep scrolling down and you'll find a few more key settings that you might have overlooked. Decide whether you want to link your Pinterest to your Facebook page. Turn the "add Pinterest to Facebook Timeline" on or off. Link your Pinterest to Twitter, or not, and decide if you want your Pinterest profile showing up in search engines.

Pinterest-Twitter Authorization Settings: Should you decide to link up with Twitter, an extra authorization box pops up. This adds an extra layer of knowledge to the data that Pinterest already collects about you. Authorizing Pinterest via Twitter means that the bird can do everything save for accessing your direct messages and seeing your Twitter password.

Depending on how you want to use Pinterest, this could either work for you, or just awkwardly combine two networks that do not work together.

Say you're planning your wedding boards on Pinterest, but on Twitter you mostly tweet about the terribly adolescent site TextsFromLastNight.com. Would you want Pinterest accessing that information?

On the flip side, an artist/writer using Pinterest and Twitter for the same purpose - finding inspiring images, articles and thought blips - could easily connect the two sites and discover even more.

Pinterest-Facebook Authorization: If you authorize Pinterest through your Facebook page, there are a few more things to keep in mind. Decide which of your Facebook friends should be able to see the content you post to Pinterest. The easiest way to do this is when you initially authorize the app on Facebook. Here's a screenshot from Camp's blog post on ESET. Select which Facebook users should see your content. Camp suggests using the "Only Me" option, so as to keep the two networks separate. If you want them to be separate, that is.

"Users need to lock down the profiles that Pinterest has access to within their Facebook," says Camp. "During that process there are some settings that the application has the ability to select only me so that it doesn't start sending all your information back and forth."

But what kind of information is Pinterest actually sharing? According to Camp, it's still pretty unclear. "They talk about it in oblique terms," explains Camp, "that there will be various other information shares. That is a little bit worrisome for users who may not expect to share that level of information."

After you've installed the Pinterest app into your Facebook account, you can always go back through Facebook and adjust the settings. To do that, go to Account Settings > Apps, and edit the Pinterest app.

Camp assures readers that Facebook, however, should be the least of their worries.

"Facebook is one of the more secure platforms," says Camp. "Pinterest is shocked that the thing took off rapidly - they haven't thought about the comprehensive fuel for it."

Pinterest Boards Are Not Private! Copyright Violations! Scammers!

Pinterest users should also know that anytime they post content to the site, it is automatically public. Unlike Facebook posts which allow users to share with specific audiences via lists, boards are always public. The one aspect that users can change is who exactly can pin to the board - just me or me & contributors. So, that image you've repinned that may or may not be violating copyright issues could get reposted a million times - and you will be held responsible.

Pinterest has raised quite a few eyebrows when it comes to possible copyright infringement, and it's something users should be aware of. Flickr, for one, came out with code that would avoid copyright infringement on content that is pinned and repinned.

"Right now it is up to the user to represent something they upload to Pinterest," explains Camp. "But what happens when it is repined a thousand times? Pinterest says that's not our problem, that it is the original poster's problem."

This means that the user must accurately represent the imagery that they post. How many of us are doing that, seriously?

Pinterest needs to do something about the copyright materials, especially if the original source is unclear. Until then, happy pinning!

When it comes to sketchy copyright issues, what about the scams you see on Facebook like "Win an iPad3!" and "Click here to redeem your Starbucks giftcard!"? These sorts of scams are beginning to pop up on Pinterest. If you come across these types of posts, do not click.

"They go through an endless amount of surveys, run the user around in circles," says Camp. "For example, you'll see something for a Victoria's Secret giftcard, and then there is no giftcard. Clicking on it rises the scam to the top of the page."

For now, Pinterest is still the new kid on the block. Users who are already onboard should pay attention to updates, and pin with impunity.

Where does Pinterest go from here? Camp is not worried, actually.

"I'm encouraged by the copyright code to Flickr, so they [Pinterest] are thinking about it," he says. "Pinterest is starting the discussion, so I hope they will continue to be proactive."

"Don't blow it up, kid" image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Unless you have been living under a non-WiFi connected Internet rock, you've probably heard the hubbub about Pinterest, the Web's new social network darling. It is predominantly lady-dominated, may in fact violate copyrights and definitely does something that Facebook does not.

I spoke to five artists: Marilyn Frank of The Franks, Lauren Levato, Justin Kemerling, Christine Rogers and James Green. They are all using Pinterest to do something, whether it's to organize ideas, share inspiration, study the culture of social networks or just to make the Internet a more aesthetically pleasing place to be.

Early Warning Signs: Marilyn Frank of The Franks

Chicago-based artist Marilyn Frank is one-half of the collaborative "The Franks" . The duo's work is ethereal, conceptual and at times ambiguous, as one can see from their 2010 work "Untitled," an acrylic on linen painting. Frank's boards on Pinterest cast a similarly straightforward yet looming feel, not-yet-birthed and raw in its emotional appeal. The words, however, are abstracted, causing one to question why something seemingly banal casts such an eerie impression.

"If you think about us as creatures of habit, I as an artist have been tearing things out of magazines and saving them...but then it's like, oh my god, I have all this crap in my office," says Frank. "And it became a burden. Then when Pinterest came out, it was like wow, I can get rid of that paper and organize my own files in a more efficient way."

With a background in graphic design, Frank's Pinterest boards feel neat and clear. There is no questioning how she sees, and how useful Pinterest has become to her. "For me, it's almost like having sketchbooks, separate sketchbooks," she says. "Everything is neat, never messy."

As she uses Pinterest more, Frank has found that her Facebook profile has taken on a different purpose all together. Now it is more useful as a space for articles and photos, and less so for visual content.

Like any social network, however, Pinterest is also social. Frank sees that as less important than the pinning mechanism. "It's a reference tool first and foremost," she says. "If other people can see it that's fine, but that's not as important."

Frank has already curated nine boards on her Pinterest profile, including Color, Space, Words, Style, Lost, Found, Love, Design and Sweet & Savory. On Words, a poster from tumblr.lostandtaken.com communicates in three letters what most Internet users are probably thinking right now. One such image came to Marilyn via Kathleen Schmathleen, a random Pinterest user based in Brisbane. It's inspiration - so does it matter where it comes from? No, not really. But copyright violations could eventually get in the way of Pinterest's success.

"I thought Napster was going to be one of those things where you just share music, and then high school kids were being taken to court," she tells me. "At the worst, maybe Pinterest will be shut down."

Paging through the works on The Franks' website, however, it becomes clear that the art itself is perhaps as fluid as the Internet and social networks. The Franks' work is based on chance, and is always in flux from the formal. Collaboration is the stabilizer, which gives the work its more material quality.

"We're constantly finding new things to explore, and usually it starts with the material or the environment around us, which is why Pinterest is so appealing," explains Frank. "If Pinterest was 'static' it would be boring. So it goes with our work. We are constantly adding to and subtracting from this palette of interests."

The Franks' next show is in May 2012 at the Beverly Art Center, which is located on Chicago's Far South Side.

Images via Marilyn Frank's Pinterest page and Franks.cc

The Bug Lady: Lauren Levato's Pinterest Love Parade

Chicago-based artist/writer Lauren Levato (a.k.a. Hi-Octane Red Head) has a lot of art crushes. When she's not in love, she's searching for bugs or shoes.

Of her eight Pinterest boards, the three that have gathered the most imagery are "Artists I Adore," "What do do when you are in love" and "BUGGERY!"

The fiery red-headed Levato is a classically trained draftswoman who was raised by wolves and resides somewhere in Chicago's bordering-on-outsider art community. For her, Pinterest is most useful as a curatorial platform for inspiring images.

"When I got on I thought, 'I can make albums,' but they're all scrapbooks. And that's the same thing I can do on Facebook," she tells me. "Right now all the people who follow me are on the same platform."

She is also using Pinterest as a way to share things that influence her beyond just art. "For example, I have a real obsession with fashion and shoes - I collect shoes."

Why does she use Pinterest? "It's just so much easier to put it together visually, so you can make this giant place where people can take one look into your thought process."

Most of the artists I talked to saw some overlap between Pinterest and Facebook, including Levato. "I use Facebook in a really personal way," she says. "I feel like Pinterest has an obsessive quality. It's like the hangover - I feel a little bit dirty. I consciously have a personality on my Facebook page, I've made decisions that these personal things are OK to talk about. And so, I do."

Levato's solo show at Chicago's Packer Schopf Gallery opens on June 1, 2012.

Lead image is a 1920s cigarette ad, not by the artist; image of the artist's studio courtesy of Lauren Levato

Look into My Beta Eyes: James Green

Chicago-based artist James Green lives and breathes Web technology. A former Apple Store employee and freshly minted freelance graphic designer, James keeps his eyes on the fast-moving image.

Naturally, James is a Pinterest fanatic who is on top of all-things tech-related. When I stopped by his Facebook page in order to find his website, he had already posted a link to a blog post he authored about the Photoshop Touch App for iPad.

When James and I met for coffee the other weekend in Chicago's art-y Pilsen neighborhood, our conversation meandered like an Internet search trail and resulted a blog post by James entitled Being Social About Social Networks. James was made for the Internet. He joined Pinterest about a month and a half ago. For him, it was a natural fit - especially since he doesn't like paper.

"I try to be as paperless as possible," James tells me, between sips of his hot chocolate. "Pinterest is like an online printer. Rather than having online file folders of things you see online, printing them out and posting them online, I can take images and organize them virtually online. I can take a picture with my phone and upload it to a board, and then share it with other people," he tells me, matter-of-factly. His seven tightly curated boards include Art + Installations, Technology, Design + Typography, Crafts + Illustrations, For the Apartment, Etsy Shop (that he is working on with his girlfriend), Fashion + Style.

Why not just drop those same images onto Facebook? James sees Facebook as more of a connection tool, "a way to connect to people you know in real life," he explains. "Pinterest is like a virtual mindscape, like virtual, digital brainstorming. I can post this on Pinterest, but I post it on Facebook it's gonna be awkward. It's like that person who posts too many links."

For his most recent show, "Beta Eyes" at ACRE Projects, James looked at the way black people are portrayed on the Internet, particularly Twitter and Google Search. He used Pinterest to organize the imagery, and when the show ended, he deleted the board entirely.

"I used it as a visual organizer to-do list," he says, "and this was my less stressful show yet."

"Artists are scatterbrained," James says. "I like to say I'm organized, but I'm not. I'm organized in terms of files, but in terms of my mind, I'm pretty scattered."

Images via JamesGreen.com; thumbnail entitled "This May Or May Not Be A Self-Portrait That is Highly Influenced By Post-Blackness" and "Why Do..." (2011).

Christine Rogers Is New to Pinterest, and She Likes It That Way

Based in Nashville, Christine's photography is of the thoughtful, long-lasting variety, rather than the quick hit viral shot. She is more interested in social networks from an anthropological perspective than the user experience. She thinks in terms of the culture rather than tool, of observing and bringing her ideas to the fore rather than actively participating. This is a seemingly cautious approach, but in reality it's about smart observation, which reveals as much about the culture as a power user could and would. Here is her Pinterest page.

"I don't go to Pinterest often. When I do, I pin a lot of things and then I give it a break for awhile," Christine tells me via phone. "I think of Pinterest as a weird gateway drug for a blog. Like, this is cool, I may as well have my own blog - I guess that's the part of artists who need to be ambitious, front and center."

Pinterest is an excellent space to organize visual imagery for public access. But Christine is not a self-proclaimed organizer, like many Pinterest lovers claim to be.

"When I had a studio, I never had an extensive wall of detritus," she says. "I am not a collector or organizer. For artists who are, Pinterest makes a lot of sense. I like to look at other artists' inboards, bit it's not this great too for me to do something different."

All that said, she has some dazzling and hilarious images on her Pinterest boards. They are of the long-lasting variety. On "material culture xo," we see a pair of kitties, one with a blue-and-white striped hat and collar piece, another with pink floral-patterned bunny ears and a pink neck piece. They are delightful, posing like dainty women, gazing at the camera with longly adorable looks. They are puss in boots.

Christine points out that Pinterest brings the format and layout, and the user must bring the images. So if a user does not agree with Pinterest's format, then the site itself will not be of any value to you. Rogers likens this to what she sees as the oh-so-similar problem of Instagram.

"It's the same with Instagram," she explains. "It's like a weird cultural format that I haven't quite figured out yet, and I don't know how to be a part of it as an artist. I think of it as something that's outside of my life as an artist. It's much more of a social thing."

What is her work like? Beautiful. In her 2010 piece, "On Earth that is in Heaven," she examines the strange phenomenon of YouTube videos of young children praying.

"Their prayers are strange, beautiful and unsettling," she writes in her artist statement. "The fact of their prayers existing in a public domain is also strange, beautiful and unsettling. Something about it feels like a message in a bottle hurled across the Internet, waiting to be found."

One of the YouTube children recites the Lord's Prayer incorrectly, replacing Earth with Heaven. Christine pairs stills of the children praying alongside various landscapes (both real and Google-ified) of the Earth. The last aspect of this installation is a video of Christine herself lip-syncing the Lord's Prayer. Because the child said the Lord's Prayer wrong, she changes the meaning entirely. "Earth replaces heaven, rupturing the past, allowing for something new," writes Christine.

Images via Pinterest/Vice.com and cerogers.net

Making the Web a More Beautiful Place: Justin Kemerling

Omaha-based artist/designer Justin Kemerling admits to using Pinterest, but not as a space to promote his own work. In fact, quite the opposite.

"Even though I'm a visual artist, I don't have my work on there," he explains. "I use it to categorize out things that I hold dear and understand. Book covers, band album covers, film covers and design, those are my categories," he tells me as we chat via phone. "That's how I categorize it out."

For Kemerling, however, the goal is not to curate his own stuff. He sees something bigger than any of that, actually.

"Pinterest, where all the beautiful stuff is on the Internet," he tells me. "Pinterest is all about the image. On Facebook, there's image supporting - but it's all about the context, the story. On Pinterest, the image is the focal point and the story, so the quality of images on your Pinterest stream is better than anywhere on the Internet."

I still want you to see some of his work, though. Here it is.

Kemerling is not using Pinterest to promote his work because, he admits, he already dumps his work a lot of places - especially Facebook. "As an artist to a certain degree, or a visual designer, if I can help sort of curate the general visual quality of images being thrown around there."

As for the strange gender divide - Pinterest is more than 80% women, last we heard - Kemerling has a simple answer.

"I think women have better taste," he says. "I can see Pinterest educating people on what good imagery is. People don't know. Even though we're surrounded by all this visual advertising and images, we have not spent much time with images. They're attached to a gateway - buy something."

On Pinterest, there's a chance to reclaim the image - to highlight the beautiful, the special, the ideal.

"If you just focus on the image, that's a better place to be than what you're doing on Facebook, where you are on Foursquare, the conversation you're having on Twitter," says Kemerling. "It's this nice beautification of the Internet."

"You Are Extra" image courtesy of Justin Kemerling