Op-Ed: Pinterest, the visual toybox that rivals Twitter

Sydney - It’s visual chaos, but Pinterest, according to Mashable, is the new hot website for all things marketable. This is visual media in overdrive, called a pinboard. People share pictures. That’s what's generating the business.

I was (very unusually) reading my LinkedIn news. I can’t say I was looking for, or have ever been looking for, Pinterest or anything like it. It comes as a massive optical blast, when you haven’t seen it before . Like an images search with text, and commentary. Brutal on the eyes, but you can’t ignore it. Says Mashable, in a tone of reverence very un-Mashable-like: Pinterest, a two-year-old social bookmarking site that lets users collect and share things they like on the web, is driving increasingly significant amounts of traffic to retailers’ websites.

The service enables users to create online bulletin boards, or “pinboards,” for popular categories such as home decor, food and wedding inspiration. LinkedIn News from Gigaom:

Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

In January Pinterest was responsible for 3.6 percent of referrals tracked by Shareaholic, up from 2.5 percent during the previous month. That means the site is quickly gaining ground on Twitter, which drove 3.61 percent of referral traffic in January, down from 3.62 percent in December. That’s more than most social media sites do in a lifetime. One of the reasons is that unlike the shopping searches, you can actually find what you’re looking for, literally at a glance. Click on the Everything tab, and just follow the categories. Damn site better (always with the puns!) than the so-called shopping stuff which for some reason show you individual items instead of real searches, etc. For example- This is the Pinterest Gardening page. Gardeners are best described as psychotic, when you’re talking about photos and imagery. They’re visual addicts in their field, rightly so. So the quality of the Pinterest Gardening page is excellent. These things are like classifieds you’d actually like to see. Google could take some lessons out of this. You can log in to Pinterest with Facebook or Twitter, and of course the symbiosis of sharing online does the rest. This is a catalytic site in which you can expect to see practically anything. It has videos and more. The Popular page is well worth a look. It’s a real collage. There are aphorisms, dresses, some cupcakes which look like they’ve been made by a florist, and anyone’s guess what else. Credit where it’s due- Pinterest, unlike all those wonderful compulsory sites which could bore a rock to death in a few seconds, is not dull. It has style, it’s eclectic, and it’s not predictable. You may find the ol’ brain wiring gets a bit frazzled with the sheer number of images, but you’ll also recognize you’re looking at something new. One suggestion for Pinterest- Do something about all those glaring white spaces. Interest, yes- Eyestrain, no. Otherwise, looks like we’ve got a new giant growing up online. Do check it out, because you’ll find something for sure.