Why all the interest in Pinterest?

By now, most of you probably have a go-to method of sharing things you discover on the Internet with your friends. For a staggering number of Canadians, Facebook is the way to go. Maybe you use Twitter. Some of you might be using Google Plus. At the moment, however, there’s no hotter place to share things than on Pinterest.

Pinterest is approaching its second birthday, but the site’s popularity has really taken off recently. In fact, it’s estimated that Pinterest was responsible for referring more traffic to websites last month than Google, YouTube, Reddit, LinkedIn, and MySpace combined and it’s closing in on Google and Twitter according to Shareaholic’s numbers. This despite the fact that Pinterest is still semi-locked down in an invite-only beta.

So what exactly is Pinterest, you ask? In their own words, it’s a “digital pinboard.” When you find something on the web that you’ve simply got to share with your friends and followers, you pin it to one of your boards — which you can title as you please and file under certain main categories like technology, sports, art, and design. You can add comments to your pinned items, and so can your followers — who can also like your pins and re-pin them to their own boards.

As you’d expect from a social sharing service, the other big piece of the Pinterest puzzle is discovery. Everything users pin to a Pinterest board is searchable and browseable, and exploratory links abound — connecting to everything from individual users’ boards to specific boards to the original location of the pinned item (like http://tsn.ca/nhl/teams/players/bio/?id=3772, which points to my Jimmy Howard pin’s origin).

Pinterest integrates with Facebook and Twitter, both for log-ins and re-sharing of pinned items with your social networking connections. The site can also scan your Facebook contacts to find friends for you to follow, and you can send invites to those who haven’t yet signed up for an invitation. There’s a companion mobile app for iOS devices, and the Pinterest mobile website works well in any modern, HTML5-capable browser.

On your first visit to Pinterest, you’ll notice the abundance of images and the simplicity of the layout. It seems to be the site’s secret sauce. At the moment, the majority of Pinterest’s users are pre-occupied with fashion, accessories, shopping and architecture. A quick scan points to a largely female-centric community – but this could change quickly. The only restriction Pinterest puts on what you pin is nudity – that’s out.

But now that the site is in the limelight, Pinterest has caused some eyebrows to raise for the way they’ve chosen to make money. If you pin something to one of your boards and it happens to be from a site with an affiliate program — say, Amazon or any other of the scores of web merchants who offer commissions for inbound clicks — Pinterest re-writes the links to insert their own affiliate code.

Using affiliate links isn’t an evil practice, of course, but altering the links a user posts to their personal boards — and not specifying it anywhere in the Pinterest terms of use — is a lot more questionable. Now that folks are pointing fingers, they’ll probably be a little more forthright about what they’re doing and why. Pinterest is already a popular service and there’s no reason it shouldn’t make money, but they need to go about doing so in the right way.

[Source: Pinterest.com via Digital Trends]