What Is Pinterest?

Have you seen a fancy little ‘P” popping up on sites you like to frequent – where the Facebook and Twitter icons hang out? That fancy “P” is for Pinterest – an online site that is actually a virtual pinboard to organize items of inspiration you come across online, and then organizes your findings for future reference and even lets you share your goodies with others.

You can use Pinterest for anything that interests you, and create pinboards for specific categories.  Create a pinboard – a set of pins — for anything that interests you, and add as many pins to a board as you want. Add online images you want to share with others by adding a “Pin” with the “Pin It” button. Any pin that is added will link back to the original site it came from – a video tutorial is available on their website on downloading the “Pin It” button. You can “Like” a Pin – doing so adds the image to your profile in the “Likes” section, but the image won’t be added to any of your boards. You’ll need to “Re-pin” if you want to categorize the image onto one of your pinboards.

Invite friends to join you, and find your friends already using Pinterest. Follow them and check out things they are interested in, and they can follow you as well. You can also follow any user you like. When you search for new things, you can sort it by categories, people you follow, or see everything from everyone.” Following All” means you’ll have all of your user’s pins on all their boards shown to you in real-time. You can follow individual boards if you are only interested in seeing a user’s pins to specific boards. You can unfollow boards and users at any time and just like “unfriending” in Facebook, no one ever needs to know.

It’s easy to get started. Request an invite from the site here, and you’ll be sent an invitation via your email account to sign in with your Facebook or Twitter account. You’ll get easy-to-follow instructions and video tutorials on how to “pin”. The only problem is showing restraint – Pinterest is highly addictive and fun.

Do you use Pinterest?