The brilliance of this pinboard site is its attention to sales.
Unless the Facebook IPO goes south tomorrow, we can soon expect more and more social network-related IPOs in the months and perhaps year ahead. This will be followed by the realization that none of these companies have any real value and all the stock prices will plummet to something more like a normal stock price.
Until then, let's keep the bubble growing. Target: Pinterest.
I wrote about Pinterest back in February, but I may have missed its true strength: mercantilism. So, I'm going to revisit the service.
If you don't have a Pinterest account, I'd advise getting on the waiting list. This site is not only genius but it is what Google+ should be. One of these days, I'll write a column deconstructing Google+, but until then we have the hottest company on the Web: Pinterest.
As I've mentioned before, Pinterest simply creates an extremely modern feed of select images and catchy headlines. This layout idea has been around for a while and it is usually associated with a type of "parker" site to collect clicks for advertisers. The first time I saw one of these sites, there was a wall of images with headlines/teasers such as "World's biggest nose documented in Moldova!" If you wanted to see this nose, you'd click only to be taken to a similar site with the same story which you had to click on again. This generated page views that advertisers wanted. If you kept trying, you could eventually find the big nose.
Pinterest has the same look and feel, only the content is user-generated and curated by the user in categories like sewing or cooking or art or whatever.
It works very much like a public blog. It's kind of like Twitter in its succinctness, but nothing like Twitter in the way it compels browsing (a.k.a. procrastination). It's far more advanced.
Users can "pin" a photo attached to a story that has to do with a personal interest. It all links back to the original source.
What makes Pinterest the most interesting of the social networking sites is that it is actually oriented around the merchants. The pins are mostly links to cool products that the person likes. It's meant for this almost exclusively. Yes, there are links to other interesting things, but most of it is for sale. FOR SALE! I seem to have totally overlooked this factor in the past.
Businesses are cropping up to exploit Pinterest and generate sales where it would otherwise be difficult. This is the holy grail of social networking for the marketing people out there. Facebook is mostly about the individual Facebook user. MySpace could never get beyond music. Yelp is mercantile to a point, but very focused and limited. I'm not sure about where Twitter fits in to the scheme of things, but it is not Pinterest.
What will happen when Pinterest gets over-populated with users? It could become a place where a lot of users are just looking for good ideas but very few users have good ideas to offer. It's still unclear. All I can say is this is getting use closer to the sales model of the future.
In the meantime, let's see what happens to the Facebook IPO. It will trigger everything.
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You can Follow John C. Dvorak on Twitter @therealdvorak.
More John C. Dvorak:
• Pinterest: The Next Big Thing
• The Value of You
• What is Wrong With Firefox?
• What We Can Learn From Facebook's IPO
• Video and Photo Apps Are Ruining Photography
• more
Go off-topic with John C. Dvorak.
