Pinterest, the increasingly popular pinboarding social network, is able to present a visually arresting interface in large part by using copyrighted images pinned by users.
"It's a huge concern for creative bloggers," said Amy Anderson, who blogs on the arts and crafts site Crafter Minds. "I don't think Pinterest does anything to help protect copyright besides removing content when people ask."
Services like Read It Later and Instapaper have developed huge followings from people who want to quickly set aside content for when they have more time, or to access it offline.
Now, along comes Spool, which promises to do much of the same link-saving as Read It Later and Instapaper, with the added perk of being able to do the same with video. We've been playing around with Spool, which remains in invite-only mode, for the past several days and found that it works (mostly) as advertised.
We also have invites available for those of you who want to try Spool out but don't want to wait around for an invite of your own.
Well, there's a reason it's not called Dude-terest. The latest darling of the up-and-coming social sharing space, Pinterest, has experienced rapid growth in both users and industry buzz in the last few months. If you had a sneaking suspicion that the majority of those users happen to be young females, you were right.
Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.
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.
When I wrote my Guy's Guide To Pinterest last week I mentioned that - at least to me - it seemed as if marketers hadn't done too much with the site just yet, making it feel like it was free of marketing and advertising.
I was, of course, quickly corrected. According to Ad Age, Real Simple magazine is already getting more traffic from Pinterest than from Facebook, and small and big businesses alike are exploring ways to use the site to connect with consumers. It makes sense: Pinterest has a clearly defined demographic, with 59 percent of the site's visitors in a recent 12-week period being women between the ages of 25 and 44.
"I believe that it varies from other social sites because of the amount of visibility you receive," said Lauren Van Grouw of Confections by Shara's Paperie, which has been using Pinterest to promote products since November. "Most platforms require a friendship or acceptance to be in place before your content can be viewed. However, with Pinterest, you are able to reach a larger audience than ever imaginable."
One of the first things I noticed when I signed up for Pinterest earlier this week is that several of my female friends and acquaintances were already on the site. It was as if they had been holding out on what many are promising will be 2012's hot ticket in the social networking space.
Of the 16 people Pinterest said I knew who were already using the site, 14 were women. Over the course of the first day, five more women I know added me and I suddenly felt like I had ventured behind some secret curtain. That is not surprising: in December, Mashable reported that 59 percent of the site's visitors were women between the ages of 25 and 44, and that 58 percent of its visitors in the previous 12 weeks had been female.
Pinterest is a visual pin board where you can collect images you find on the Web and arrange them in categories with links back to the original site. It's been described as being like a binder or folder that you use to store everything you clip from magazines and newspapers, but you have the added advantage of seeing what all of the people you are connected to have been clipping and saving.
The word "bookmark," referring to a saved Web link, is starting to sound old. "Bookmark" has this connotation of turn-of-the-century Web browsers, when there weren't Web-based services for saving things. Your local bookmarks folder was where you kept links you wanted to go back to. These days, we're browsing on multiple devices, and links aren't necessarily "sites," "pages" or "articles" anymore.
Links can point to all kinds of things. Most of the time, we'll probably never need to visit a link again. But there are plenty of links we want to keep, even if it's just to remember them. How do we keep track of saved links? Where do we put them? I talked to Jori Lallo, developer of Grove.io and a link-saving side project called Kippt, to learn about the future of the bookmark.
Today the Q&A site Quora announced the debut of boards, which function a lot like stacks do on social bookmarking site, Delicious. Boards organize information around a specific topic, making it simpler for users to follow related content. You can collect similar questions that are already up on Quora and grab links from outside the sites. Considering that Quora is all about questions, why would it choose to go this route?
Ever since its redesign, Delicious has looked increasingly like mainstream social bookmarking site Pinterest. The latest Delicious UI overhaul applies the same visually focused look to the link-saving page, which was operating under the "old" look until just today. The new design is focused on visuals and stacks, whereas the old version was more about tags and recommended tags. Is it bad that Delicious is trying to copy Pinterest's look?
Findings.com is a new service that gives users a way to highlight and save quotes from digital texts and e-books, and send that information into a central, socially oriented news feed. The idea came about four years ago, when writer Steven Johnson wondered what it would be like to capture what someone was reading. Finding and capturing quotes is only one part of this service, though - its magic lies in the discovery aspects of the metadata.
"It's all about discovery, discovery of ideas, clips, people and other related materials. Over time we hope to conceptually connect peoples' findings to enable discovery," says BetaWorks Founder and Findings.com Co-Founder, John Borthwick. "We aren't collecting what people are reading right now on their devices (e.g. Kindle). We are collecting what they annotate."
