This news note comes from&BI Intelligence,&Business Insider's research and and analysis service. The&charts and data featured here are available for download in the&BI&Intelligence&library.&Please sign up up for a free trial here. Pinterest is emerging as an early star&in social media-powered commerce.& In fact, Pinterest sent more traffic to e-commerce websites in 2013's first quarter than it did in the final holiday shopping quarter of 2012, according to&Monetate's quarterly e-commerce report.&Pinterest drove twice as much e-commerce traffic as Twitter, and had&the highest average order value among social media referrers, at $80.54.&

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

A lawsuit filed yesterday by Theodore F. Schroeder claims that Pinterest investor Brian S. Cohen stole the idea for the social sharing service. The suit, which was first reported in AllThingsD, claims that Schroeder "originated the ideas that led to the popular, ever-growing Pinterest webs..

Source: techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

Awesome story.

Source: dailydot.com → | ∞ Permalink

Do you want your Pinterest images to stand out and get repinned? With more than 12 million users posting pictures to the image-based social network, it’s important to make sure images grab the attention of fellow Pinterest users. A properly optimized pin can make all the difference between 50 repins or no repins.

Source: mashable.com → | ∞ Permalink

PinReach is your source for Pinterest influence analytics. We are working to empower people and brands with the tools necessary to monitor trends, understand activity, and gauge impact, easily. That, and you get a Reach score updated daily!

Source: pinreach.com → | ∞ Permalink

You love Pinterest? Calculate Your Pinfluence.

Pinfluence is measure of your popularity on Pinterest and value of your each pin.

Source: pinpuff.com → | ∞ Permalink

Analytics for Pinterest.

Pinterest friendly dashboard. Take control.

Source: pinerly.com → | ∞ Permalink

Self hosted is not for everybody IMO.

But I like the Step #7,&

Scatter Strategy:

1. Submit the post to Triberr
2. Submit the post to BlogEngage
3. Submit the post to Blokube
4. Submit the post to BizSugar
5. Submit the post to HackerNews (if it relates to that audience)
6. Send out a Tweet
7. Post it on Facebook
8. Share it on Goole Plus
9. Pin the Image on Pinterest
10. Submit the post to StumbleUpon
11. Post it on Quora
12. Share the post on Inbound.org
13. Leave 5 comments on Top Blogs
14. Send a Tweet to anyone I mentioned within the post
15. Finally, I email my subscribers about it.

Source: hectorjcuevas.com → | ∞ Permalink

If I want to put up a menu, I can just use their [Boostrap} code that does menus. Sure, my menu looks like all the others, and that's a good thing, for users. No need to learn a second or third way to use a menu.

I cannot agree more. Today, users are used to Facebook, used to Twitter, now used to Pinterest. They do things one way and when you take it away from them, they are confused.

Do yourself a favor and don't try re-inventing the wheel when your primary goal is for people to use your product.

Source: scripting.com → | ∞ Permalink

Great post. Must read.

The story hasn’t been fully written but consider companies like Tumblr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Foursquare, Fab, AirBnB and plenty others.

They didn’t start out as rocket ship. Quite the contrary. They started off rather slowly and bumpy.&

Source: bijansabet.com → | ∞ Permalink

Because Pinterest is the hot topic of social media, it has come under a lot of scrutiny. First about the use of affiliate links, and now about copyright issues in relation to items saved (or “pinned”) by users. Essentially, people are freaking out and removing their Pinterest content because they fear the legal repercussions. But is Pinterest the first to do this? Not by a long shot.

Source: kikolani.com → | ∞ Permalink

Highlight text on any website and get ready to create a image out of it for sharing on Pinterest or other social networks!

Highlight to quote is a neat functionality.

Source: pinaquote.com → | ∞ Permalink

It's hard to write a story or post about Pinterest and copyright law without at least one reader leaving a comment along the lines of "What about Tumblr?" Indeed, comparisons between the two sites are fairly obvious: while Tumblr is more of a blog platform and Pinterest is more of a link-sharing site, both are set up to allow users to easily share content they find on the Internet, and both do a great job of displaying visual content -- whether or not the person sharing that content has rights to share that work.

Why we should read TOS when we sign up...

And here's the kicker: The user agreement of both sites has language requiring users indemnify them against any copyright claims, Bradley said. They can do this by claiming proietections for service providers included in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Source: readwriteweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest is successfully riding a new trend wave in the social space, moving mechanisms for content sharing beyond connections (friends) and towards relevance, effectively broadening the social horizon for us content addicts. Google+ has been the first to fuel this trend, by connecting social to search and media, and expanding the notion of connections to “Circles.” In addition, according to several industry rumors, Google has expressed interest in acquiring Pinterest.

As the “wisdom of crowds” converges, it results in what is called a "folksonomy." Folksonomies dramatically lower the barriers to information sharing, as well as discovery. Pinterest “one-upped” the game on link-sharing by tacking on self-expression, a most vital social currency. It nailed information relevance and social behavior in a single package.

The end note:

“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak.”

Source: fastcompany.com → | ∞ Permalink

I really enjoy the Pinterest site as do many of my family and friends but I am concerned that they will be forced to shut down for copyright infringement reasons. So, I took a look at Pinterest’s DMCA Policy and related terms and found lots of things they need to fix immediately.

Source: dmcahandbook.com → | ∞ Permalink

As the third most popular source of content on digital pin-board site Pinterest, Flickr and its photographers are subject to frequent acts of copyright infringement. But a site-wide update to Flickr promises to better protect members and their copyrighted works.

Flickr set up the meta Pinterest 'nopin'&on all copyrighted images.

What a move!

Source: venturebeat.com → | ∞ Permalink

Watch video from the people you care about.

Good luck to them with that Magify patent hanging over their head. And nice Pinterest design :)

Source: chill.com → | ∞ Permalink

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Done right, it can also help the imitator tap into the zeitgeist and pick up more followers as a result. That looks like it might have been some of the logic behind the relaunch of the website of Easy Living, a UK magazine published by Conde Nast, which relaunched this month with a Pinterest-like grid interface on its home page.

Check it out:&http://www.easyliving.co.uk/

Source: techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

At the same time, we understand and respect that sometimes site owners do not want any of their material pinned. For these folks, we provide a snippet of code that can be added to any website.

meta name="pinterest" content="nopin" /

Source: blog.pinterest.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest could be in Fair Use territory (meaning, legally protected).& Fair Use law allows people to use work they do not own the copyright to.

There are four elements to consider when determining if something is&Fair Use:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes
2. The nature of the copyrighted work [is it fictional or factual]
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion [of the work] used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for, or value of, the copyrighted work

Perfect 10 v. Google&[...] Google won the case. The courts ruled that Google Image search is Fair Use because it's transformative.

Maytal told us, "The use of the thumbnails was highly transformative, allowed users to get to a source of information that they couldn’t otherwise get." Google Image search becomes a social benefit and a reference tool.

Read more:&http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-illegal-faq-2012-2

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest has managed over the past few months is spectacular. Recently reaching the milestone of 10 million users, the site has gained traction faster than just about any other site in history. But with that growth comes the responsibility to handle it and the site seems to be falling into spammer territory. A couple of hours ago (as of the time that I’m writing this), Google’s Don Dodge started tweeting that Pinterest was sending him a mass amount of emails saying that he had been followed on the site, and then asking him to follow that person back.

Black hat email marketing?

But with the average Facebook user&having 120 friends&(and many folks having exponentially more), it’s easy to see how growth of active users like this could happen in a much less justifiable way. To quote a Facebook friend of my own, “spam called. They want their idea back.”

Source: thenextweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

A screen grab of the BBJ's pinboard, showing architects' renderings for planned buildings throughout Boston. After a careful read of the fine print, it has been taken down.

Unlike other social media services, when you ‘pin’ something on Pinterest, you automatically upload an (at least) medium-sized version of the related image to the service. Exceptions for publishers of user-generated content&protect Pinterest, but they don’t protect you. Unless you know you have a "worldwide, irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license," you'd better tread carefully. I was not able to immediately reach Pinterest, for comment.

Source: bizjournals.com → | ∞ Permalink

Arguably most intriguing, however, is that 80 percent of all pins are re-pins, meaning that an overwhelming majority of content shared on site is recycled between users.

“Pinterest is conducive to sharing,” Moore said in an interview with VentureBeat. “There’s a very low barrier to sharing [pins] with everyone who is following you,” Moore said of the re-pinning phenomenon.

If i am not mistaking, this is the same for Tumblr in terms of re-sharing vs adding. It is important for any network to allow users

Source: venturebeat.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest is no longer using Skimlinks, and they probably realized that affiliate marketing did not perform too well as a revenue model for their platform.

Why?

Because Pinterest is a discovery engine. People are not in the mindset to buy when they browse Pinterest, and most pins are not products anyway. This means, a low click through rate (CTR) and verly low volume of sales (low conversions), on top of which they need to split the commissions with Skimlinks. That's not much left.

Pinterest needed to clean up the drama, so they added a new topic "How does Pinterest make money?" on the help page section. Time to move on.

What users need to understand is that Pinterest will test making money, because like&any other startup, Pinterest needs to make money at some point to be a sustainable business.

But what will be the right advertising model for Pinterest when&brands/marketers take over the site?

I bet on "Sponsored" pins.

Pins that would be relevant to a pinboard, targeted to specific users/visitors demographics and do not disrupt the discovery process of users, actually add quality to it by helping discovering new products for example.

It took over a year for Twitter to test and build their advertising app, so it probably will take a couple months for Pinterest to build an interface to allow brands and maybe small businesses to advertise on their site.

Source: bumpzee.com → | ∞ Permalink

Is that really a surprise? Pinterest already blew off any expectations they could have had in terms of building a valuable destination for millions of internet users. Their stats are more impressive than Twitter's at the same running point. Making money is much simpler than driving millions of users to a website everyday.&

There is one problem: The 16-person Palo Alto, Calif., start-up isn't sure how it is going to make money.

"Pinterest's monetization strategy isn't in the oven and it's not even off the baking table," said Jeremy Levine, a board member of Pinterest and a venture capitalist at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We have one hundred ideas but no execution as of yet."

This is your common startup problem when you offer a free service. Although in this specific case, i think there is a huge opportunity for brands to advertise on it. Fashion advertising can drive high revenues.

The prospect of making money off of social-networking sites, which are usually free to users, has been a challenge. The options for Pinterest suggested by analysts so far, which center around selling targeted advertising and data on users' interests, aren't terribly original and run the risk of alienating users—problems faced by bigger social-networking sites such as Facebook.

Source: online.wsj.com → | ∞ Permalink

Start your own movement...

Pinterest is popular because it feeds our insatiable appetite to share the things we’re passionate about. It allows us to start movements of our own, pointing others to things we like and enjoy.

People share, curate...

Pinterest is now taking it one step further and allowing us to share anything we come across on the web. Buzzword or not, ‘curation’ is here to stay.

Visual inspiration...

And you tap into a digital world of curation, sharing and visual inspiration. It’s the future and it’s happening right now.

Source: forbes.com → | ∞ Permalink

I love it when a startup I’ve been covercloning for literally years suddenly finds itself in the spotlight, and for the right reasons. In this case, Skimlinks, originally from London but now with a growing US base, has been revealed as powering the affiliate links behind Pinterest, one of the hottest startups on the map right now. For some that appears to be a little bit of scandal, at least for Pinterest. LLSocial uncovered the practice, whereby if a posts Pinterest happens to link to a commerce sites with an affiliate program, Pinterest uses Skimlinks – a third party service – to modifiy the link to add their own affiliate tracking code. Anyone making a purchase from that click through sends affiliate revenue, via Skimlinks, back to Pinterest. Kerching, everyone benefits.

Source: eu.techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest is the new popular kid on the Internet, getting featured in media outlets like celebrity gossip does on tabloids. What people aren’t talking about however is the opportunity that exists for more ‘behind the scenes businesses.’ Those amazing symbiotic or parasitic relationships where third parties benefit from Pinterest’s new hype, sort of like Entourage™ with a cast of publishers, affiliates, and merchants.

At the growth rate they have reached "comScore showing Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly U.S. visitors" (via&Techcrunch), and even with a CTR probably low, they must still be dropping lots of cookies....

Source: blog.compete.com → | ∞ Permalink

Most people who use Pinterest are there for the cool things they can find and re-pin. Many of those find and pint new items themselves, adding to the experience overall. Lots of people have expressed dismay that someone might want to use Pinterest for anything commercial, while other see no problem with it so long as they don’t wind up feeling “sold to” every time they visit the site. Some items pinned on Pinterest are for sale. Not necessarily directly by the pinner, but somewhere. And, Pinterest is taking advantage of this to make money. If an item is available through an affiliate marketing arrangement, Pinterest uses a program called SkimLinks to add their unique identifier to the link, thus generating a commission for themselves if you buy the item.

They've got to make money somehow, and they must be disclosing this somehow... well i hope for them.

Source: webpronews.com → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest points to something interesting: absolutely bite-sized curation is a trend to consider. Gentlemint points to the next trend: targeted use of curation technology to build interesting content in a group setting is hot.

What if you set up a “Pinterest for Guitarists?” Not, “Hey, you can use Pinterest and build guitar boards,” but “Here’s a very targeted site of like-minded people all sharing interesting stuff.

This is exactely why we built Shareist.

Source: chrisbrogan.com → | ∞ Permalink

We want to democratize the ability to sell stuff online. You're a creative person; you create a lot of content. But most of it sits, archived, on some computer somewhere for the rest of time.

It's either too hard, or too time-consuming, or it doesn't even make sense to put in a store! We let you easily sell the stuff you haven't been able to, yet.

It turns out, that includes a lot of stuff:

• Beta previews of a video game you are developing.
• Some music that you never released. Your fans would love this.
• Unused illustrations you spent hours and hours working on.
• The source code of a killer app you developed.

Very smart idea.

Sahil Lavingia the creator of the service is a pretty smart dude, part of the founding team of Pinterest, and built turntable for iPhone...

Source: gumroad.com → | ∞ Permalink

Best analysis i have found so far about the success Pinterest is dealing with. Note that they are still as of today, in private beta.

The goal is a simple one, you ideally want your users to be able to browse through hundreds or even thousands of images with relative ease.

One important step in this battle was “masonry” style layout, a fairly recent trend in web development named after the&jQuery Masonry&plugin. Pinterest uses its own scripts for this, but the concept is the same.

Websites&love&pagination because it increases their page views (more views = more money), but as a user it sucks [...]&To solve this problem, the Pinterest team looked to infinite scrolling [...]

It’s interesting to note that the Facebook News Feed, the epitome of website addiction, uses infinite scrolling.

Pinterest on the other hand, has actually found an audience largely with females.

[...]&in order to get people to actually use your digital content collection service, you have to make the act of collecting and sharing content a nearly effortless task. [...]&This creates a system where collection is super easy and encourages lots and lots of pinning.

Source: designshack.net → | ∞ Permalink

Pinterest is able to avoid violating U.S. copyright laws thanks to a provision in the Internet Service Providers Act, which gives immunity to sites that publish information provided by others, according to Aaron Messing, an associate with OlenderFeldman LLP in New Jersey. As long as Pinterest continues to comply with a provision of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act that requires it to remove content when asked by the copyright owner, users are free to continue pinning any images they find on the Internet.

Source: readwriteweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

To accomplish this, Pinterest has mastered the art of minimizing cognitive load – in other words, reducing the mental effort required to do what the site wants users to do. Reducing cognitive load is what good design is all about. Making something simple makes it easy to understand, easy to use, and ultimately increases the desired behaviors.

Consuming information through images is easier, which means users consume more of it than ever before.

Visually simple.

Source: forbes.com → | ∞ Permalink

Social and search continue to be essential inbound marketing channels. And while Google’s generating a lot of discussion around its new social network, Google+, another website is actually driving more inbound traffic: Pinterest. With its U.S. traffic skyrocketing to more than 10 million visits, the virtual pinboard is now one of the top 10 social networking and forum websites. Our latest infographic introduces you to Pinterest and provides ideas on how you can use the social photo sharing website to promote products, build community, and drive website traffic and conversions.

Source: monetate.com → | ∞ Permalink

According to a new report published by&Shareabholic,&Pinterest drove greater traffic than LinkedIn, Google Plus, Reddit, and Youtube…combined. Additionally, Pinterest was just .01% shy of tying Twitter for the 4th spot and .02% behind Google, which currently sits in 3rd place.

Pretty impressive numbers, i can see it.

Many consumer brands are also experimenting with Pinterest, using pinboards to present complementary products, ideas, and imagery to inspire consumers to visualize and remix new possibilities. From fashion to interior design and home to retail to entertainment, brands are using Pinterest to thoughtfully assemble a curated lifestyle.

Source: briansolis.com → | ∞ Permalink

My wife (and it seems every woman in America) is now addicted to Pinterest. It’s the new magazine. I think it’s replacing time spent on TMZ. It’s graphical, beautiful, simple to consume, and has a wonderful layout. But that product is the perfect example of perfectly suited for the web given the real estate available.

Ah Pinterest, they do it all right...

Try to think about how leveraging the web will do the following:

• Create a differentiated product versus your mobile-only competitors. Use that as a source of competition.
• Have the ability to enable “content creation” and “content curation” in a way that makes all of the mobile consumption by other users a better experience. If you have a fashion-sharing product, wouldn’t viewing collections of outfits on mobile devices be a richer experience if there were more content and deeper content because your web product enabled your power users to more easily create it?
• Conversely allow your mobile products to&shine&on the web. Using the fashion-sharing example, imagine turning your shared fashion photos into beautiful magazine-like collages that can be scrolled through, Pinterest style.
• Build features that make using native-phone apps pointless. Case in point: Text messaging. If you use the native device your messages get purged eventually on most devices. You also lose them if you lose your actual phone. Having a web product abstracts the text message from the device and makes it a truly cloud service. When consumers realize this – who in their right mind would keep their text messages locked on their mobile device?

Source: fastcompany.com → | ∞ Permalink

In creating its digital presence, Kate Spade has managed to convert the je ne sais quoi of its meticulously designed physical visual merchandising (read: eye-catching store windows in SoHo and on Fifth Avenue) and products into a decidedly on-brand experience. Using its blog, which is integrated prominently into its main e-commerce site, as well as varied social media presences, the Kate Spade team has developed and maintained a voice and visual point of view that reinforce the brand while avoiding heavy-handedness.

Branding, and the same theme for every platform they build a presence on: colorfoul collages of products, articles and media curated by their team. A publishing model that works.

When Kate Spade picks a direction, it goes with it, and all its content channels reinforce the same seasonal focus. It utilizes that same collage-like approach for its boards on&Pinterest, which is perhaps the most well-suited platform for fashion brands to share its inspirations, and the pattern du jour, stripes, abounds. The Kate Spade Tumblr&(also&organized as a collage) takes the theme one step further, providing the shareable added bonus of downloadable iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, and computer desktops in –you guessed it – stripes.&And, of course, Kate Spade’s&Twitter page is decked out in a striped background.

Check it out:

@katespadeny on Twitter

KateSpade on Tumblr

Source: contently.com → | ∞ Permalink

My takes...

"push button content generation."

Here's what he means: Clicking Pinterest's "Pin It" button, which can be added to your browser's bookmarks toolbar, will automatically grab the picture you want from the website you are on. What is different is that it immediately adds it to any of your Pinterest boards, allowing you to categorize your content then and there. The boards each have a separate page and can be easily accessed, shared and viewed on a sort of mother board on your Pinterest profile.

"Importantly, it was easy for new users to consume these sets of content visually as structured sets, and to share these sets with others," Gil wrote. "This next wave of social curation will fundamentally change how users find and interact with content over time."

Source: cnn.com → | ∞ Permalink

the 3 pillars of a good curation tool:

• accesibility
• fun pleasure
• usability in a daily routine

It's&easy for anyone&to curate, as it takes the best of what TumblR allows you (bookmark a content you like) and optimizes the way it's archived (boards are far more intuitive explicit than scrolling a blog)

Source: socialmediatoday.com → | ∞ Permalink

Search vs. Social Discovery is the epic war that will define the tech landscape for the next few years.&Search Engines are morphing into Socially Powered Search Engines, discovery sites are booming and small businesses, and craftsmen are able to reach a whole new audience via the internet.

Pinterest’s user growth&is a good indicator of what’s to come for retailers. Smart merchants will look for ways to drive traffic from these types of sites, by working with them directly or partnering with groups like Skimlinks that have discovery sites in their publisher base.

Product disovery engine, visual, interesting, fresh content, lot of trends for e-commerce in 2012.

Source: blog.skimlinks.com → | ∞ Permalink

It's no mistake that Pinspire.com is built on the same concept, has the same look, the same color scheme and even the same feel to its cursive logo as the hugely popular social bookmarking site Pinterest. Pinspire is, after all, the latest venture of Germany's Samwer brothers, who have been developing copycats of popular sites and selling them off since 1999, when they sold Alando to eBay for $50 million. More recently, they started and sold GroupOn clone CityDeal to GroupOn and Zynga clone Plinga to Zynga....

This so ridiculous. On the other, it shows you that nothing can't be duplicate which is scary.

&

Source: readwriteweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

Therefore, Gil sees an evolution of blogging platforms turning into push-button publishing. So there's a move from stream-based consumption to a more organized form.

Read more:&http://www.businessinsider.com/pinterest-is-a-sign-that-we-are-turning-into-social-curators-2012-1?op=1#ixzz1isJfiX5i

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

The most interesting wave hitting the social web in 2012 is social curation. &This was kicked off in 2011 as Pinterest's growth was noticed by Silicon Valley and a number of companies quickly followed suit -&Snip.It launched as a social information curation platform, Quora adopted boards for a similar purpose, and&Fab.com launched a structured social commerce feed. In this blog post I will discuss the evolution of social media from long-form to push-button, the emergence of social curation on sites such as Twitter and Tumblr, and the move to structured sets of curated content on Pinterest and its brethren.

Source: blog.eladgil.com → | ∞ Permalink

Svpply, Pinterest, ModCloth, The Daily Grommet, Wanelo and JustBoughtIt!, Storenvy, vi.sualize.us, Polyvore and MyDeco made the list.

Source: apartmenttherapy.com → | ∞ Permalink