Pinterest

I am fairly tired of Facebook, to be honest. After unfollowing all who post pictures of their kids, their breakfast, recent acquisitions or peace & love memes, I was left with a fairly robust news feed. At the same time, the Wow factor has diminished as well, as you can imagine. I remember the old days when I would scroll through the news feed minutes on end. It used to annoy me but It was rather hard to abandon the screen and do anything else, even on the computer.

This has a lot to do with Pinterest. As I had no idea what this app was all about (and I still don't), once I made an account and selected the required number of interests (apparently Pinterest wants to make a profile of you right away), I was left watching a wall full of tall rectangular pictures showing assortments of quotes, memes and the occasional well designed diagram.

As far as I have gathered, you can 'pin' (as in 'save') pictures you like into one or more 'boards', which act like folders. Pictures also contain the source link. You can either use the embedded browser or open it into your default browser. A post can also have a description and there's also a comments section. Nothing fancy, but very well adjusted for smartphone screens.

Tapping on commentators will take you to their profile page, which contains all of their folders and pins. It's a weird thing that you can't message them directly. You do have a messaging feature but in order to contact a user you will need to compose a new message from the inbox screen and type in the name of the user. At least Pinterest provides suggestions, and as long as you recognize the user's avatar, you can make sure that you're sending to the right recipient.

Of course, pins can be shared to the outside world, just as you can share outside links to your Pinterest account. I don't know exactly why I need to mention this to you. Pinterest is well established in the online world. Only an online ascetic like me would no have discovered it until today.

Features

• Pin exploration depending on interests and subscriptions
• Boards help you organize your pins
• Search and find relevant pins

Conclusion

Pinterest seems to represent a virtual notebook. The one you use to remember addresses recipes, and party ideas. It might come in handy to some, but I think it's overly bloated with a lot of useless content.