Computer Support Blog

Unlike some of the clone sites of Pinterest that sprouted up when Pinterest’s meteoric rise to popularity began, most notably Shopalong, Pinterest has been stumbling through monetizing the site.  While the executives at Pinterest are not at all resistant to the idea of monetizing, like Facebook’s founders were when they were simply focused on creating something new and cool, Pinterest has been slower than some similar sites to figure out how to make money off its own popularity.  For the last month, though, Pinterest has taken steps to stop others from making money off the site, even as it figures out how to better generate revenue itself.  Some of the ways Pinterest is working, under the guise of stopping spam, to prevent other individuals and sites from utilizing Pinterest include: Read more »

There are few Internet sites where the sole, unabashed purpose of the site is to make money.  For sure, virtually every business on the Internet is there to try to make money, but most try to offer customers a product or service or otherwise disguise the fact that they are making money off your visiting their site.  Many websites take an approach similar to Facebook, where they focus on the experience of the site, as opposed to how the company will make money off it.  At the other end of the spectrum is Joseph Einhorn. Read more »

If imitation is the highest form of flattery, then Pinterest has a lot to feel flattered about!  In addition to enjoying a lot of press in the online media, Pinterest is the concept that many new social networking sites appear to be trying to imitate.  Pinterest allows you to “pin” any image you find on the Internet to your bulletin board on Pinterest to share with your friends and followers.  You and your friends may comment on the pictures and the site inspires some very lively discussions.

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Social networks rise and fall lately with a frequency that is troubling for those who become invested in the new social networks appearing on the Internet.  Each Internet social network tries to appeal to a different niche audience and it is intriguing to see which ones take off and which ones fail to find their market fast enough.  Arguably the hottest new Internet social network is Pinterest and if you haven’t heard of it yet, it begs the question “where have you been?!”  Pinterest has been making quite a lot of news on its own and as a reference – in articles about other up-and-coming Internet social networks – lately.

Pinterest is a budding social network that is most analogous to Twitter combined with StumbleUpon . . . for online photographs.  Let’s untangle that, shall we?  Twitter only allows 140 characters; the whole point of the social network or messaging service is to provide quick blurbs to your followers to give them instantaneous status updates.  They are short, focused and not often all that useful.  In a similar fashion, your Pinterest page – which is imagined as a bulletin board upon which you and your friends “pin” digital images – is likely to become a cluttered, messy space as you and your friends find more images to pin.  The sense of activity and networking is represented by your friends being able to comment on every image you post.

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It is absolutely astonishing to see how fast a social network can rise on the Internet.  It seems like Internet social networks fall much, much slower than they rise – one need only look at the slow fading of MySpace to recall how they might linger – but when a new social network is a hit, it can come out of nowhere.  That is the story of Pinterest.  Pinterest may not be a household name yet, but the little social network had about one third the traffic of Twitter in January 2012, making it a sudden force in the social network market.  With such a sudden demand for its service, Pinterest has a great reliance on Aubrey Obata Kendall.

Aubrey Obata Kendall is the chief recruiter for Pinterest.  Since November of 2011, Kendall has been staffing up Pinterest in order to help the small company grow to meet the current and forthcoming demand for their services.  Because Pinterest is currently so small, the recruiting position is especially important to the company.  Aubrey Obata Kendall’s judgment on staff may well affect the course of the entire company, so the reliance Pinterest has on her is actually quite high.

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