Pinterest, ladysplained.

[lisarea]

Ha ha, instead of waiting around for some fat lazy moderator to split off the incipient Pinterest discussion from that other thrad, I am just starting a thrad my own self, like I think I am all hot shit!

So I have the Pinterest, and see some appeal in it (and can prolly also send invites to people who want them), but I don't think I've figured out how to do it very good, so I am interested in some of the kinds of things you guys are doing with it.

[LadyShea]

Send me a fucking invite already someone. ES has all the things, you pea have my email address

[wildernesse]

Demi's post needs to be copied to this thread, because I read it and was all, Ooohhh, that's what I can do with it! I am new to Pinterest, and had apparently been deleting invities because the people I saw most interested in it at first were using it for stuff I didn't care about.

[LadyShea]

Thanks Pea. I am confused already. It's just pictures?

[livius drusus]

Well if Little Miss Thradtention Slore up there hadn't jumped the gun, Demi's excellent explanatory post would already be here.

[LadyShea]

I already hate the settings. I have to unlink it from Facebook at the very least, guys, sorry if I hurt your feelings

[Demimonde]

Aww, you guys are sweet! I shall quote myself and feel important.

Originally Posted by Demimonde

The best way to describe it is to have people try it. I have invites too if yours run out ES.

It is the best of all social media, thrown together, for me. Users share image based links which can be commented on, browsing these links is awesome in a beautiful interface where you can search among your friends or all of Pinterest. Your links are posted to your personal boards that you make, where you control the content and who has access to post content. I like to think of those boards as my own personal subreddits.

It has the following feature of Twitter, so I can find and follow the people who share interesting things. BUT unlike twitter, I can filter out what actually interests me about the person. I can read their design stuff, but not their vacation stuff, their humor posts, or if I think their sense of humor sucks, I can choose NOT to follow that, and just see what blogs they are reading. For me, this is huge, because their are tons of people who I am interested in like 10% of what they share on FB. On FB I have to scroll past it all, looking for the chestnuts. On P I can just follow that board and fuck the rest.

What is really interesting is how prexisting communities online are finding overlap on P. The Etsy and ravelry are two groups that have adopted like a mofo. Bloggers are having a field day as well, and I am finding all kinds of blogs I had never heard of. It has been great!

Two things I figured out since we had that chat about it. The "gifts" thing is where you can search for products in a given price range, which is kinda handy for some, but not for me. Also, the potty mouth thing that Gizmodo loled about isn't really true IMO. It is a "nicer" community in that people are less like dicks, but swearing does happen. I guess it depends on which social circles you run in.

Tips for starting. During the set up select as many interests as you like, but know that is just following the big wigs on P and that you will most likely have to go and unfollow their crap. Do sync it with your FB and your twitter to find cool people you already know. I was amazed by this, because some of the most uninteresting people on FB are the best pinners. Which shouldn't be too surprising because I suck at FB and hardly share anything. Then do some searches in "interests" or in "everything" and start repinning. But remember to follow the people who you have posted the good stuff.

And everyone who joins should follow Jennifer Lawson AKA The Bloggess because she is doing it right.

ETA: Because I totally forgot about the point of this thread.

It is currently a very female dominated community. I have referred to it to friends as the "anti-reddit" for that reason. I think that article points out all the reasons why. But yeah, the tech bloggers who have been all mystified at it's success while asking for a dude's Pinterest is hilarious to me.

That said, I have guy friends on who share some awesome stuff. There is totally content for everyone there.

[Demimonde]

What are you hating about the settings, Shea?

[LadyShea]

No customized privacy controls.

And the one thing that is there is ambiguously worded so I don't know if ON/OFF is the correct setting

It says "Visibility ON/OFF Hide your profile from search engines"

So is that
visibility (to search engines) on/off
Or is it
hide from search engines on/off

[Demimonde]

Huh, good question. I have mine set to OFF but I am not sure if I did that or what it means. I don't mind being searchable though, I will see if I can find anything in the FAQs.

So for those of you who are there, you might set up a few boards of things that interest you. But try not to be overly specific, because if you are anything like me you will be finding new categories all the time. Then you can either go to a category that interests you, or just go into Everything. I like Everything because you can find a lot of the more off beat stuff there that don't fit into their categories. You can also do a search for odd ball stuff. Example, I searched "ponies" and found some people posting pony mods out there that I followed, because fun.

When you find someone you might want to follow, the easiest thing is to click the big follow button, but that subscribes you to all their boards. I like to pick and choose from what they have. That way crazy pony ladies' obsession with frogs will not seep into my stream. Likewise, y'all most likely wouldn't be interested in my ponies or my ukuleles or whatevers.

It is good that if you like something, you don't have to pin it. There is a separate like list on your profile so you can find stuff.

Here is my profile.

[wildernesse]

lol, i feel all stalkery just now bwhahahah.

[Demimonde]

No need for that. I like sharing.

Actually, now that I think about it, it really isn't anything different from our P0rn threads. You find cool stuff, you share it. Everyone oohs and aahs or giggles at it.

So really, all us ers were pinning before Pinterest was even a thing. We are Pinster-hipsters.

[LadyShea]

The FAQ is out of date

How to prevent your account from appearing in Google search

When you're signed onto Pinterest, click your username at the top-right toolbar, then click Edit Profile. Select the checkbox to have your account hidden from search indexes. Be sure to click Save Profile at the bottom of the page.

It's not a check box, it's an on/off toggle lol

[Ensign Steve]

I tried to send the invites like I said I would, and I thought I did, but I don't see anywhere where it says that I have x more invites to give, so maybe I'm doing it wrong. It looks like I'm just posting "hey, look at pinterest!" to people's facebook walls. Maybe I'm too new to have any actual invites. The internet is hard! Does one of you nice ladies have a son or grandson who can help me out with it?

FWIW, it took about 36 hours from the time I requested mine to get it.

I don't know how I'm supposed to use it, but I am having a blast doing it my way. I read the description and parsed it like it's some sort of mind-map utility, or possibly for bookmarking things for later, or who knows what. So I spent about a whole weekend just fantasizing about future trips and decorating ideas and life goals and I made boards for them and populated them with pictures and ideas and stuff. Now the next time I hear about something cool to do in London, I can go pin it on my London board and then when July rolls around I'll have a whole pile of stuff all in one place to remind me what I wanted to do in London.

[Ymir's blood]

Maybe if you get Bey to help you?

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[Ensign Steve]

Oh, I gotta tell y'all... You know how I said in the other thread that there's a bunch of guys from my gym on there? Well this one guy is totally pimp (usually we just see each other in gym clothes, but sometimes you'll catch someone on their way in or out in their street clothes, and also we socialize a little bit outside of the gym, so every once in a while you see people in their real clothes and you're like "wow! it never occurred to me that you wear anything but gym clothes" [I have gotten that reaction myself] but anyway this guy is straight stylin') and he keeps posting to the "MyStyle" default board all this fly gear like watches and pocket squares and sunglasses like Kanye West would wear, and I'm like hell yeah. Dude has great taste.

[Demimonde]

Okey dokey, I posted on the group and have friended/invited all the respondents. I would have done it sooner but we went out tonight. It does just send a msg to your FB wall saying "Join Pinterest!" or something.

You are lucky it only took 36 hours for you to get off the wait-list, ES. I did it two or three weeks ago and it was a full SIX days before I got it and I was all Not cool, Pinterest! But seriously, considering how they are growing so fast and their servers are overloaded, I understand. Anyone else get a fail whale level blech-out like I have been getting? I have gotten it a few times a day since I joined.

Also, they do have a toolbar add on which is really helpful. It doesn't come with Chrome or any other BS, just a simple add on so you can pin what you are looking at wherever you are. I really like how you can pick which pic on the page you want to pin. The most dramatic pic will get you repins/followers.

Pro tip: before you pin something, click on the permalink to the post you are linking. My shit is going crazy with silly people linking to google image search or the main page of blogs rather than a particular post. It isn't hard to do, but many participants haven't figured that out yet. For me, if I am following you, that is a deal breaker, because it is total info-tease. I don't want just the pr0n, I want the source and the description! The etiquette I have found is - if you care enough to sleuth for the mystery thing and find it, link it in their comments and pin it intact to your own board.

Any yeah, ES. I think this is the best use of "social bookmarking" I have seen. (At least that is what my Web 2.0 prof would call it. ) I was totally intrigued by delicious and all that, but I always found it ugly and hard to use. Also, it didn't have the filtering capabilities that Pinterest has. I would much rather know what y'all find interesting on our shared interests rather than some huge aggregate of what the whole world is looking at ie digg or stumbleupon. So it is a natural progression I think, and one with huge potential.

[lisarea]

I liked delicious, but did not move over with them. I've thought about getting a pinboard.in account, too. They're like $10 now. They were only a couple of bucks when I started thinking about it, but I'm slow.

I do like pinterest, but there's a couple things I need bookmarking for that I don't think really fit well with the model.

For one, a lot of the things I want to bookmark are unphotogenic, or sometimes even text-only, like long form writing or instructions for computery stuff and things like that, where if there is an illustration, it's probably ugly anyway. I do see some people getting around that by making infographics or just tagging any old graphic that shows up on the page, but that doesn't seem optimal.

Second, they don't seem to have a tagging system! So if I try to find new tags in "Technology," I can't narrow that down by common keywords, and I end up wading through a bunch of iPhone cases and the aforementioned infographics (mostly about SEO for some reason) and other things I don't care about. I love tag clouds, so I can narrow down searches by subject rather than trying to find some other person who is pinning the types of things I'm interested in and then following a human rather than the topic I actually want to follow.

I still really like it for a subset of bookmarks, but I don't know how to make it work well for other stuff.

[specious_reasons]

So, anything microscope related on Pinterest? I don't really need more social media sites, but I'm always looking for information.

[lisarea]

You can look around on it without an account. It seems pretty much ideal for discovering pictures, so if that's what you're looking for, it'd probably be ideal.

[wildernesse]

Yes, I would like some kind of subsets under the main categories. You can sort of do this by searching for your topic, and then there are options at the top for pins/boards/people so you might find a board that say lets others pin to it and be completely on that topic.

That doesn't help you find stuff that you didn't know you were looking for, though.

[Janet]

One of the other librarians showed me a library Pinterest account the other day, but they seemed to be mainly using it to show cool book related stuff. If we did it I would want it to be more ready reference, like a board with all the local elected officials pictures that would take you to their contact page or one with links to other local organizations or something. Do those of you who use it think that would be successful? I don't know if people would bother to use it or not.

[Demimonde]

Yeah, a tagging system is totally needed. Also, people's tendency to name things cute, funny stuff makes it harder to search. They have added the @ shortcut so if you pin something that you want someone else to see, they can find it. I think, like twitter, the user base will find ways to work/hack the system and make it more useful. It just needs some more time.

It is exciting to be at the beginning of a new network with so many possibilities, though.

ETA, actually Janet that sounds like a brilliant application for it. You would need to have a constant stream of new stuff to remind people you are there, but once people follow you they could always go to that reference pinboard and have all the info they would need. It would also be easy peasy to set up.

[Demimonde]

Originally Posted by specious_reasons

So, anything microscope related on Pinterest? I don't really need more social media sites, but I'm always looking for information.

I found this board. Not many pins yet, but it has a large number of followers so the interest is already there.

It is so early yet, I don't think many niche communities that would be perfect for it have made it over. Photographers of all kinds have flocked there, and I would expect much more content from micro-photographers in the next few months.

[lisarea]

Ha ha, so I was in a different thrad just saying I should make a Pinterests about appropriate sartorial choices to become a scary old lady, so then I was like OKAY. (Speaking of cute, hard to search titles.) Is there some way to let people contribute to it without having to slave over a hot keyboard all of the live-long day typing in names and stuff?

What do I look like, a data entry clerk?