Early last year I wrote four articles on Pinterest, because I had heard that women in particular gravitated to it and I was curious about what they liked about it. I liked its pinboard concept, and wanted to get a grip on it, too. This is the first.
February 22nd 2012
The techie sanctum and the mainstream are clearly taking notice now of what has been a two-year sleeper. Once again, because of the great take up, as announced by ‘quant’ firms, a lot of people are gaga over it. I’d say success is assured for Pinterest, as Pete Cashmore enthused in Why Pinterest is 2012's hottest website.
My take on this great take up?
First, women.
No, not in the way that perhaps most men may think. Rather, it’s about the veritable force women exert online, for social and commercial purpose. And not just online, but in organizations as leaders and in the economy as a whole, too. I’ve seen more and more converging evidence to this effect. So wherever women go, many of us ought to follow. Clearly many of us do.
Hear Rory Cellan-Jones muse Pinterest - hot new network or another Quora?
So will the same thing happen to Pinterest, with a blaze of excitement followed by a return to obscurity? Perhaps not. What is different about this network is that the early adopters appear to have been women with mainstream interests – design, fashion, travel – rather than the geeky guys who peopled Quora, and may have proved intimidating to later arrivals.Second, portraits.
What I’ve come to gradually dislike is the ticker-tape phenomenon of the likes, of course, of Twitter. It’s a fast moving, unwaveringly linear trajectory of a mashup of things. Now that’s fine, and clearly millions of people love Twitter for this very phenomenon. They jump therefore on a train that runs on perfectly straight tracks.
To me, Facebook runs more or less on the same linearity. Interestingly, though, I think its new Timeline is an effort to capture the more organic and holistic way we experience life. That is, non-linear, in my parlance. So Timeline is a better portrait of us, as the Mark Zuckerberg has aimed to make it.
However, Pinterest is ahead of Facebook in this key respect. Have a look at this screen shot from its home page:
Our lives are circuitous and recursive. We don’t always do things chronologically, or even logically for that matter. We collect, we loop back, we vault ahead. As if the present, past and future were indeed at our disposal. All at once!
Pinterest isn’t there yet, as far as capturing this wholly is concerned. But arguably it may be one of the best at it that we have. Women know it.
Thank you for reading, and let me know what you think!
Ron Villejo, PhD
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