Pinterest

Whenever I find an image online I like and want to hold on to I save it to my hard drive. The problem with this is it just takes up space and my friend will never know about it unless I upload it to Facebook. Now with Pintrest I can save all my favorite images and videos online in a way that shares them with my friends and makes it easy to organize.  Apart from saving precious free space on my hard drive free, this also acts as a backup in case where my computer where ever to crash and I lost all my data.

Here is how it works. When you are surfing the web and come upon an image or video you would like to save you click a widget in you favorites. Pintrest then opens a secondary page with all the video’s and images of that URL mapped out in a grid. You select the image or images that you like, add a caption, and then pin it to a specific board in your profile.

Boards are the way you organize you images on Pintrest. Each has a name, description and pertains to usually a somewhat specific subject. For myself I have boards like Sci Fi and My Politics. Once you pin something it will show up in a feed like Facebook of recent posts. Here it shows the image or video, your caption, and what board you pinned it to. Users also have the option of letting others post on their boards. This is a wonderful collaborative feature. There is a repin option where you can take an image that you like and post it to one of your own boards.  It will then say you name via another user. This is a great way to follow new people with similar interests as you. One of the best features of Pintrest is the ability to either follow everything a person pins, or only specific boards that they pin to. This is very useful because, for example, many girls like to use Pintrest to keep track of fashion and shopping. I do not necessarily have an interest in this, so in order to keep my feeds relevant to only my interest I can choose to follow specific boards of my female friends and not follow those that I would not look at anyway. Another great aspect of Pinterest is that they it can also double as an image hosting site. Boards are basically albums.

Pinterest provides the first real internet cutting board. Instead of cutting out pages of interior design magazines or downloading images to a folder, you can pin it to a board. The same can be done for a number of jobs such as event planning. It is a great way to compile ideas together. Very basic and simple idea applied to a digital format. Perfect.