First of all Pinterest, before I start talking about how awesome you are, I need to apologize. You see, YOU were going to be my very first GigaMom post—the debut, the beginning, the new chapter. Yes.
But then a week of technological craziness happened. GoDaddy.com had a huge outage, my annoyance about Facebook contests came to a head, the iPhone5 was announced and to top it all off, Internet Explorer discovered they had a nasty security flaw.
It was beyond my control—I had to be a responsible GigaMom and discuss these topics as they happened and sadly, that meant you were shuffled to the bottom of the blog list.
Forgive me, Pinterest.
Okay, there’s my gushy love letter to Pinterest & I’ll stop writing like it’s an actual person...although you know, it’s quite likely is.
My name is GigaMom and I’m a Pinaholic. I’ve been addicted to Pinterest since...well, that’s really irrelevant right now, isn’t it? The point is that Pinterest is here, it’s huge, it's addictive and it’s not going anywhere. Pinterest isn’t a fad, it’s fun. It’s not hard to figure out, and once you start using it, you too will likely have an addiction. And you may be in need of a #Pintervention like I am.
By the way, I’m pretty sure I came up with the term #Pintervention. Just sayin’...
What Is Pinterest? Pinterest is a virtual memory board. Imagine a huge cork memo board in your room when you were a kid—remember how you would pin things on there that you wanted to always remember? Sometimes, if you were very organized, you would pin things on the corkboard in groups. Here are all the cool concert tickets, over here is some cool artwork, in this corner photos from vacation and up at the top, some of the best slogans you’d ever heard.
That’s what Pinterest is. Only it’s virtual and you do it online. On your computer, from your phone or tablet, anywhere.
Many many moons ago when the internet was very new, there used to be webrings. Webrings were collections of favourite websites that were grouped together—usually by a navigation bar at the top of the page. So you’d find one for say, Halloween, and then that would lead to another website, which led to another one yada yada yada... you get the picture. But the flaw with webrings is that as soon as you went off to another site, you lost all of the other ones you were at. Frustrating to say the least.
Then bookmarking came along, and you could easily categorize websites right in your browser. Worked really well, but ultimately, you ended up looking at a big list of websites and didn’t really have the patience to go through each one looking for that cool pumpkin costume you saw 7 weeks earlier.
Thank gawd Pinterest came along and changed all that. Now you just log into your Pinterest account and then as you are surfing the web, you just “pin” graphics & photos from the sites on to your account.
It’s brilliant. Pumpkin costume found in moments.
Sign up to join Pinterest here. All you need is an email address to get started, and if you want, you can connect your Facebook or Twitter accounts as well. It used to be that Pinterest was invitation only and you HAD to connect a social media account, but that changed in August of this year. So go on, sign up... I’ll just wait here for you while you do.
You’ll see that more and more websites now have share buttons on their pages that include an option to post on Pinterest. All of our pages at YMC have them (That doesn't come as a surprise to you, does it?). Or you can install a Pinterest bookmarklet into your browser. That’s probably one of the easiest methods of pinning.
It just is. Ask anyone what Pinterest is, and chances are, the first thing they'll say is "It's addictive!"
I’m glad you asked...
OF COURSE WE DO!
You can find us over here on Pinterest—as of today we have 47 boards and are closing fast on almost 2,000 pins. Take a look & let me know what you think.
Some of our pins have gone absolutely viral on Pinterest, the biggest one of all is quite likely Maija’s breakfast muffin recipe
Then there’s Ali’s post about belts
And also pretty much anything from Sarah Gunn...
Not only is YMC big on Pinterest, we’re also having a Pinterest Back-to-School Contest!! Take a look at our contest page here & then have some fun at our Back To School Pinterest board. Three lucky winners will win a $50 Indigo gift card - but the contest closes September 28th, 2012 so hurry over there and pin it to win it!
And of course, feel free to pin this post too...did you notice all of the pretty things I put in here for you to pin?
I’ll see you at my #Pintervention.
Printer-friendly version