Pinterest: Board-ening Your Horizons

When I first heard of Pinterest, someone was referring to it as "Google images for girls."

It took awhile for me to jump on the bandwagon, but when I did, the appeal was instantly apparent.

It also became apparent that "Google images for girls" was an inadequate description. 

Pinterest, in essence, is a visual discovery tool.

Users explore and organize various interests by saving "pins" to "boards."

Pins are images. Many are linked to websites where you can find more information pertaining to the picture.

Some don't link to anything, and others are simple, user-generated j-pegs. 

Boards are categories in which users save related pins.

These categories can have wide scopes ("Truth") or specific purposes ("Wedding Ideas").

Users can also choose to "follow" friends and strangers alike, giving them access to other users' pins. 

Below, you can watch a short video of how it works.

Pinterest gives users an aesthetically-rewarding way to learn more about their interests or perhaps find new ones. 

For example, the majority of food-related pins are linked to websites where the recipe is written. 

When pinning a picture of lemon poppyseed pancakes, a user has the option of annotating the pin. 

That is, he or she can write a short blurb about how wonderful or awful the recipe was. 

The numerous and varied nature of the web sources that Pinterest is built on is in itself a foundation for collective intelligence. 

When you add in a touch of social networking and annotating capabilities, you have a buzz of information sharing. 

Obviously, it is not possible for any one person to learn everything.
However, with this platform, a user can learn from multiple sources in one scrolling session, and the wealth and richness of those sources is made possible by the input of many other users.
The sum contribution of multiple users creates a compilation of knowledge much greater than that of an individual user: thus, the very definition of collective intelligence.

Pinterest has already become a popular way of gathering inspiration and information in the process of planning anything from hiking trips to weddings.
Collective intelligence via easily consumable bytes provides Pinterest with a plethora of possibilities. 

The Internet is a vast horizon of information.

Pinterest gives people a way of broadening it pin by pin.