What Does Pinterest Really Do?
Pinterest has set out on a social networking excursion that would frighten even the most ironclad of companies: In a world full of intimidating social networking behemoths like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, Pinterest seeks to gain substantial market share in the social networking industry while simultaneously creating something that is both inventive and one of a kind. In an extremely crowded and competitive market, they have taken it upon themselves to redefine just what social networking is all about.
And yet, it seems that a lot of people (or maybe even most) don’t really know about Pinterest. They’ve heard of it, sure. They know that it’s new, and different, sure, but they don’t really know what it is. “What does Pinterest do?” they might ask, “and why should I care?” The first answer would be that Pinterest is, in essence, another social networking site. A place for people to connect and network and share interests.
But it’s also kind of different.
Connecting People Through Interests, Not Networks
For one, Pinterest isn’t focused on strictly connecting people. Other social networks — particularly Facebook and LinkedIn — emphasize connectivity and networking; people to people connections, rather than just networks of information. Certainly, information flows freely between people on both networks, but they also emphasize networking to a large degree, too. On the other hand, Twitter tends to place a heavy emphasis on the free-flowing nature of information. It isn’t so much a social networking site (although it undoubtedly is) as much as it is a platform for broadcasting.
Pinterest, on the other hand, is about interests. Fashion, clothes, home decor, food, vacation settings — anything that one might remotely consider an interest on the web, Pinterest most definitely contains in some capacity. Pinterest’s raison d’etre — its reason for existence — is to help people organize content from all sorts of different sources on the web, be it a fashion website or a recipe board, and put them into a convenient virtual pinboard.
Its ultimate goal, beyond providing a social networking solution for interests, is to connect people that are looking for the same things. For example, if one individual is looking for solutions for wedding planning or recipe suggestions for a date, Pinterest’s huge array of virtual pinboards hopes to provide those individuals with hundreds if not thousands of diverse solutions.
Making Event Planning Open-Source
And Pinterest also stands to completely change how ideas for events are planned and sourced through social networking. By giving individuals the ability to openly voice their own opinions on such issues as home decor, wedding planning and other events — currently, the social networking website is dominated by mostly women — Pinterest has created an open-source network of ideas that, similar to LinkedIn, grants experts and professionals the opportunity to show-off their planning and web-scouring capabilities.
What this has done is that it has created an online marketplace of ideas that, before it, hadn’t really existed in such a clean, simple interface. By creating a social networking site that, almost exclusively, focuses on the exchange of ideas, Pinterest has managed to keep itself free from all of the useless spam and clutter that tends to take away from social networking sites.
A Social Network Where Networking Is Secondary?
And maybe calling Pinterest just a ‘social networking site’ is much too restricting and harsh of a designation, because Pinterest isn’t strictly a ‘social network’ so to speak. Sure, people network and definitely connect through Pinterest, and there are rather limited profiles, but that isn’t the true essence of the social networking site (but let’s be real, it’s still technically a social networking site).
Instead, Pinterest wants all of its members to be resourceful contributors in a tight-knit network for ideas. Networking, on the other hand, is secondary.
And do we even care about other people’s problems to begin with?
Source: MSM DesignZ, Inc. is a Westchester social media company based in NY specializing in advertising, web and graphic design, and SEO.