Well, duh.

Facebook fans are the holy grail of small business, according to a recent study. In fact, 41 percent would take the two million fans, almost double the number that would prefer a celebrity endorsement or a million-dollar Super Bowl ad.

The data comes from a study of 500 small businesses by Staples which asked, in part: If a genie granted you one wish to market your company, what would you want?

Source: Staples

Which of the following would you select?

Perhaps most interestingly, small business owners prefer Facebook fans to Twitter followers by almost a four to one ratio. Only 12 percent of the owners picked two million Twitter followers, suggesting that Twitter followers are only 25 percent as valuable as Facebook followers and fans. That makes sense, given recent data that engaged Facebook fans are worth hundreds of dollars each in lifetime value, with some — for brands like Zara and Levis — being worth $300-400.

Compare that to a Super Bowl ad that makes a momentary buzz and then is gone, or Twitter followers who are much less likely to actually see any communications from the brand, and the value is clear.

“The results showed that these savvy business owners are not only utilizing social media in advanced ways but that the understanding of the philosophies behind why social media works and how it can help business were advanced,” a Staples representative said.

Further evidence of that?

Engaging customers via social edged out boosting sales when business owners — who spend 5.5 hours per week on social media marketing — were asked why they invest time, energy, and money in social. That’s a big difference from even a year ago, when increasing sales was the most important reason for most businesses to jump on the Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest bandwagons.

Which doesn’t mean, of course, that small businesses don’t want to profit from social and don’t want to increase their sales. It does mean, however, that they realize the relationship matters more than any one specific purchase, and that nurturing the relationship first will lead to great lifetime value of the customer.

One other interesting point as Twitter ramps up its advertising products, having recently launched more small-business-friendly ad options: LinkedIn is actually the second most frequently used social channel, and Pinterest ranks higher when business owners list social sites that are helpful.

Interestingly, given that many small businesses still today do not have a website (three out of five in this survey did not), 61 percent felt their blogs were their most helpful social media channel.

Image credits: Staples

Clearly, however, not anymore.

“Seventy-one percent of consumers say they post hashtags from their mobile devices,” RadiumOne VP Kamal Kaur told me yesterday. “I’ve even caught myself hashtagging in my emails.”

Hashtags help communicate ideas and feelings, the 500-person study says, help Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest users redirect their friends and followers to related content and help unrelated people participate in a larger social conversation. The hashtag was born in strictly geeky circumstances on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, a form of group messaging that arose in 1988) and made its way to Twitter in 2007 with now-Google employee Chris Messina’s tweet:

how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?

— Chris Messina™ (@chrismessina) August 23, 2007

But with almost three quarters of this study’s respondents — 70 percent of whom were women, and 44 percent of whom were middle-aged — using hashtags, they’re definitely not something that’s confined to young, geeky, and, shall we say it, male culture.

Interestingly, social media users seem to use hashtags much more preferentially on mobile devices than on laptops or desktops, something that may be due to the built-in capabilities for doing so in many social media apps, Kaur said. Of respondents who say they use hashtags, 70.5 percent used them mainly on mobile, and 29.5 percent used them mainly on their desktop device.

Perhaps the reason for the high use is, simply, that they work.

“Fifty percent of respondents said they would explore new content through hashtags,” Kaur said. “People even use hashtags in Facebook, even though you can’t search by them yet there.”

People who see a hashtag tend to click on it, explore it, use it in their own posts, or even check out the person or brand that tweeted it. That’s something that people who want to share their content more widely, including online marketers, should keep in mind.

photo credit: mikecogh via photopin cc

Developed by Flickr to enable up to 10 code releases each and every day, DevOps is a continuous deployment methodology that uses high levels of automation to bring development — coding engineers — closer to operations, the team that builds and runs the servers that deliver the software to users.

According to a new report by IT automation provider Puppet Labs, 63 percent of companies are now using at least some DevOps methodology. Companies that do, ship code a staggering 30 times more often than companies that don’t and accomplish that rapid turnover with 50 percent fewer errors.

Not surprisingly, the deploy rate — how often companies actually update live production code — increases as the length of time of DevOps implementation increases, and the change lead time decreases. In addition, the change failure rate decreases.

How?

Puppet Labs’ report says that version control, which allows instant rollback and quick pinpointing of changes that could have adverse effects, and automation, which helps companies create and run a set of repeated and automatic steps for each and every code deployment, result in the achievement of what might be seen as two diametrically-opposed goals: quick reaction time and lower error rate.

More details, visually, in the infographic:

photo credit: Leonardo Rizzi via photopin cc

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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This is huge, because brands like Sephora say that their Pinterest followers spend 15 times more than their Facebook fans.

The new analytics package tells you what people are repinning from your website, how many people are seeing those pins, and — a key measure for your social marketing ROI — how many visits to your websites those pins generated. It will also show you visual selection of your most pinned, most clicked, and most recent pins so that “you have a better idea of what’s popular.”

“For example, if you have a travel blog, you’ll be able to see whether people are pinning your ski vacation posts or beach vacation posts more,” Tao Tao, a Pinterest software engineer wrote on the announcement blog post.

Much as Facebook’s Insights for Facebook page owners, the new analytics are basic measures of the most important engagement numbers. Before today, to get good information on Pinterest campaigns, brands needed a third-party analytics tool such as Pinfluencer or Curalate.

While you’ll still be able to get more insight and data and particular marketing tools from third parties, this announcement from Pinterest covers the needs of most casual Pinterest marketers.

“This is a good basic analytics product to serve as a foundation for Pinterest. It has great features around impressions and reach that large brands and agencies care about,” said Pinfluencer CEO Sharad Verma, noting that Pinfluencer also has Google and Omniture integration, as well as many other marketing and e-commerce features. “No third-party analytics can accurately report on impressions and reach.”

And the new tool is — perhaps — a shot across the bow of Pinterest third-party apps that have been “filling holes” in Pinterest’s now-growing suite of business tools. Pinterest has been fairly partner-friendly to this point, so we’ll have to wait and see if it’s now moving towards a Twitter-like practice of warning developers away from areas where it plans to make money itself.

To get access to the new analytics, you’ll need a verified Pinterest website, and you’ll need access to Pinterest’s new look.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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You pay, that is, while others view.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Tumblr VP Derek Gottfrid said the blogging network has already tested the product internally, will roll it out in the first half of 2013, and is currently looking for advertisers who want to sign up. No word yet, however, on exactly how promoted posts will actually be promoted, or what tools bloggers will have to decide who they get promoted to.

The new revenue will, Gottfrid thinks, drive the 162-employee and 100-million-blog company into profitability this year. Which seems to be a likely goal, even if only a fraction of its 16 billion total page views transition over to the ego-driven monetization model.

Tumblr, which became the ninth most popular site on the U.S. web in 2012, significantly improved its mobile apps late in the year, including its iPhone app and a new iPad app. But the company did not introduce any form of monetization at that time. This new native advertising model will ensure that traditional banner ads don’t clutter the mobile experience, but will present posts to users who might not have intended to see them.

One interesting note that Tumblr’s sales head Lee Brown let slip: Tumblr’s average advertising sale is just under $100,000 … meaning that major brands and enterprises are behind much of the site’s current revenue.

This is once again expanding the native ads landscape. We have Twitter with promoted tweets (which it just started selling via ad partners), Facebook with promoted posts, and now Tumblr with, perhaps, trending Tumbls.

All that’s needed is for Pinterest to introduce promoted pins, which I confidently expect sometime in 2013.

One question: where are WordPress.com and Automattic? (Update March 6: testing native ads too.)

photo credit: matt coats via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Craigslist is possibly one of the ugliest sites on the web. But you can experience it as if it was Pinterest, as long as you use Mokriya Craigslist on your smartphone.

Mokriya is a design studio that has worked on apps for companies like Hipster, Sidecar, and Path, building cutting-edge, simple, beautiful mobile apps for iPhone and Android. Mokriya Craigslist is its first foray into creating products under its own brand.

“We wanted to build an experience on par with some of the best mobile apps,” chief executive Sunil Kanderi said. “Using Craigslist should be as pleasant an experience as browsing Pinterest.”

So the company reached out to Craigslist — aware of issues companies like PadMapper have had when using Craigslist data — and worked out a licensing deal, then rolled up its sleeves for a six-month design cycle.

The biggest challenge?

“Craigslist has tons of categories and subcategories,” Kanderi says. “Because the challenges to build a mobile app for Craigslist were more than a usual app, we had to innovate on the UI to create a compelling experience. So we use very few native UI elements.”

While the data is straight from Craigslist, the company has been so successful that browsing Craigslist on Mokriya is actually pleasant, and, believe it or not, beautiful.

And it’s not just about the browsing, either.

“You can also post your Craigslist ads via Mokriya,” Kanderi told me. “Just enter the headline, description, take a couple of pictures, pick a category, set a price, and you’re done. Our goal was that you could post an ad within a minute.”

Mokriya is on iPhone and Android smartphones at first, but an iPad version is on the way. It’s a free app, but if you want to post an ad or add favorites (bookmarks on sales that you want to track), there’s a one-time 99 cent charge.

Image credits: Mokriya

Far too cheap.

Beauty products retailer and digital trailblazer Sephora says that per-capita, its Pinterest followers spend more money than its Facebook followers, and not just a little bit more. In fact, Pinterest users spend 15 times more on Sephora products than Facebook followers, Sephora’s head of digital Julie Bornstein told me this morning.

“The reality is that when you’re in the Pinterest mindset, you’re actually interested in acquiring items, which is not what people go to Facebook for,” Bornstein said. “Facebook continues to be just a great customer interaction tool that gives us the real-time ability to dialog with our customer; it’s a big customer-service venue for us.”

Ouch.

If you’re Facebook, that’s gotta hurt. You’ve just been downgraded from the bright and shining future of social shopping to the back office hell of customer support.

Sephora jumped on Pinterest hard, mostly because its largely-female marketing team were enthusiastic early adopters. When the company re-launched its website in April last year, it was one of the first retailers to integrate the ‘Pin It’ button sitewide. Individual users share their lists of what Sephora products they love and why — rather than just a putting together a list of fashion products, they can use Pinterest to tell a visual story about why a certain eyeshadow is so great and seek to inspire others. And a dedicated resource on the Sephora digital team helps Sephora staff craft Pinterest strategies.

All of which has made an impact.

Sephora’s following on Facebook is still huge and significant, at 4.7 million fans. And it’s a critical early-warning system for the company. “We hear instantly” about what people love and don’t love, Bornstein says, and Sephora clients connect with each other on the platform, giving each other fashion and beauty tips and advice.

But in terms of immediately measurable commercial impact? Pinterest is currently unmatched.

“E-commerce really is still in the first innings of really leveraging the power of social,” Bornstein says. “But we’ve experimented a lot with social shopping, and this is the first one that has really gotten to scale.”

photo credit: cobalt123 via photopin cc, swanky via photopin cc

We’ve become aware that a hacker accessed our system this week. As soon as we learned of the attack, we patched the vulnerability and closed the access that the hacker had. Our ongoing investigation indicates that the hacker had access to the support information that three of our customers store on our system. We believe that the hacker downloaded email addresses of users who contacted those three customers for support, as well as support email subject lines. We notified our affected customers immediately and are working with them to assist in their response.

Zendesk manages backoffice features like customer support and help desk operations via a cloud service it delivers to hundreds of clients serving over 65 million people, the company says on its website. Only Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr clients were affected, the company says, but those sites comprise literally hundreds of millions of users.

Since most end users never touch Zendesk directly, most users’ first awareness that there might be a problem with their personal informtion will come via an email from one of the affected services. I received an email from Tumblr this evening at 11:05PM PST, saying that my information may have been exposed.

Assuming Zendesk knows exactly how deep the penetration went, there is probably not a lot to worry about. The attackers gained access to email addresses and the subject lines of support emails, but there’s no indication they accessed any passwords or other data.

In other words: don’t panic.

Here’s the email that Tumblr sent out to affected users:

Important information regarding your security and privacy

For the last 2.5 years, we’ve used a popular service called Zendesk to store, organize, and answer emails to Tumblr Support. We’ve learned that a security breach at Zendesk has affected Tumblr and two other companies. We are sending this notification to all email addresses that we believe may have been affected by this breach.

This has potentially exposed records of subject lines and, in some cases, email addresses of messages sent to Tumblr Support. While much of this information is innocuous, please take some time today to consider the following:

• The subject lines of your emails to Tumblr Support may have included the address of your blog which could potentially allow your blog to be unwillingly associated with your email address.
• Any other information included in the subject lines of emails you’ve sent to Tumblr Support may be exposed. We recommend you review any correspondence you’ve addressed tosupport@tumblr.com, abuse@tumblr.com, dmca@tumblr.com,legal@tumblr.com, enquiries@tumblr.com, orlawenforcement@tumblr.com.
• Tumblr will never ask you for your password by email. Emails are easy to fake, and you should be suspicious of unexpected emails you receive.

Your safety is our highest priority. We’re working with law enforcement and Zendesk to better understand this attack. Please monitor your email and Tumblr accounts for suspicious behavior, and notify us immediately if you have any concerns.

This is an breaking story, check for updates on Friday.

photo credit: alles-schlumpf via photopin cc

In other words, the rumors appear to be true.

The visual social network’s last round was in May of 2012, when the company raised $100 million at a $1.5 billion valuation. The current round, if true, comes close to doubling Pinterest’s valuation … and gives it much more time to figure out revenue.

Valiant Capital Partners apparently led the round, but existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Bessemer Venture Partners and FirstMark Capital also reportedly took part. Japanese web retailer Rakuten led the previous round.

Pinterest still only has about 100 employees, and while the network’s growth may have slowed, it has solidified a place alongside Facebook and Twitter as one of the top three social networks in North America. It currently has about 31 million unique monthly visitors, according to Compete.com:

Source: Compete.com

Pinterest traffic

I’ve contacted Pinterest PR for comment and will update as we learn more.

Curalate released a visual analytics product today to answer that question — the first analytics solution to consolidate both Instagram and Pinterest reports in a single dashboard.

“Images drive emotions with an immediacy that no other medium offers,” Apu Gupta, Curalate’s CEO and co-founder said in a statement. ”We’re helping brands see the bigger picture — to engage audiences across networks based on what’s most relevant rather than what’s most recent.”

Curalate’s solution will allow companies to see which images are most popular, merge customer conversations about their images on both visual social networks together, and create promotions for Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook simultaneously. In addition, Curalate will help brands distinguish between engagement with content that fans have posted and content that the brands themselves have posted.

Analytics for social media networks are superhot right now.

Offerpop just released a new Facebook analytics solution, as did ePrize, and Pinfluencer introduced a very sophisticated image-searching solution for Pinterest a week ago. Curalate’s solution also uses image recognition algorithms to identify shared images.

Curulate says that customers like HGTV, Nine West, and designer Michael Kors use the solution.

“Zappos wants viral repins on Pinterest,” Pinfluencer chief executive Sharad Verma told me. “They’re also using our analytics product to understand which images are the most popular and generating the most engagement … and to know who their advocates or fan are.”

The year-old marketing and analytics company now boasts an impressive customer list that includes Etsy, Jetsetter, Martha Stewart, Sephora, and Orbitz, mostly because the hundred or so marketing campaigns that it has run have generated an astonishing 250 million product impressions.

Those per-campaign numbers are huge – 2.5 million impressions each — and I asked Verma why they’re so big. The key, it seems, is in the Pinterest platform.

“That is where Pinterest and Facebook are very different,” Verma told me. “Pinterest is all about products.”

Facebook is about conversation and brand awareness, he said, while Pinterest drives sales. According to Pinfluencer, the average brand on its platform boosts website page visits per pin by 400 percent, doubles the pageviews per pin, and boosts revenue per pin by 50 percent, from $0.14 to $0.21.

In the December shopping season, Pinfluencer says, its clients took home a massive $0.64 in revenue per pin.

Zappos used Pinfluencer’s free version for four months before making a decision to jump to paid levels, which is typical, Verma says. Signing on gives companies competitor tracking — Pinfluencer currently tracks 10,000 brands on Pinterest, and will be bumping that to 100,000 — Pinfluencer’s marketing and analytics suite, and unlimited users, for an annual price that “fits on a credit card.”

“Through Pinfluencer, we have been able to boost audience engagement, site traffic and virality which results in increased earned media conversations and sales for our company,” Graham Kahr, a social scientist at Zappos, said in a statement. “We now have a way to actually measure the ROI of our Pinterest initiatives. This is huge for us as a company and for the industry.”

With Pinfluencer currently tracking 10,000 brands on Pinterest and planning to bump that by an order of magnitude, I wondered aloud if the company has a relationship with Pinterest, perhaps using an API.

“I think the only thing I’m allowed to say is that they’re aware of what we’re doing,” Verma answered.

Leading VOIP and cheap call provider Rebtel asked 1,632 American adults what effects social networks had on them. In a classic can’t-live-with-it, can’t-live-without-it scenario, almost 20 percent of American adults said Facebook was the social network that has the “most negative effect” on their mood, and another 20 percent said it caused them the most stress.

However, Facebook is also the site that almost half of Americans said was the most positive.

In other words, Facebook is such a big part of our lives that our experience of the site pretty much mirrors our experience of life: sometimes our friends piss us off, sometimes they make us sad, but more often, they make us happy.

One thing that’s almost guaranteed to drive your friends nuts? Including them in status updates and location check-ins. 45 percent of us don’t like it when we appear in social media updates that others create, and 70 percent say that’s because they don’t like to broadcast their location.

LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube caused almost no stress, as did MySpace. In MySpace’s case, of course, that’s because no-one actually uses the site anymore. But the social media site that are the most positive are Instagram and Pinterest, with only .3 percent and .1 percent, respectively, saying they were stressed out by those services.

One other interesting data point the Rebtel survey highlighted is how social media makes us feel.

On days when we check into social accounts more frequently than normal, we’re typically bored. Of course … that might be the  reason we’re checking in in the first place. But on days when we’re checking in less frequently than normal, we’re typically feeling left out, like we’re missing out on something.

In other words, we’re addicted.

photo credit: Amir Kuckovic via photopin cc

In last month’s Christmas shopping season, paper catalogs influenced more holiday shopping than Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and mobile advertising platforms. And that’s not just for bricks-and-mortar stores — that’s for online shopping too.

Flyers and catalogs influenced 22 percent of online purchases and just slightly less, 21 percent, of offline purchases, according to the 1000-participant study by Baynote, a customer experience solutions company. Facebook, meanwhile, influenced 15 percent of online purchases and 12 percent of offline, and Twitter and Pinterest were at the 10 percent levels for both, according to Baynote.

“This year’s survey demonstrates the difficulty of selecting one marketing channel over another as the connected consumer becomes the status quo and as mobile and social shopping behaviors mature,” Dan Darnell, Baynote’s VP of marketing said in a statement. (It’s worth noting that Baynote’s business is multi-channel marketing solutions for retailers.)

There is some hope for digital marketers, however, even if social media is not yet turning out to be the powerhouse for revenue that some have wanted it to be.

Good old-fashioned email promotions edged out flyers in online purchases, affecting a full quarter of all online sales, and just barely trailed in offline sales. Google searches were basically tied with email promotions, and online ratings and reviews were the most powerful of all, affecting a full third of all online purchases and a quarter of all offline.

Which brings us to Amazon’s massive power as America’s price checker.

A full two-thirds of consumers don’t go to a price comparison engine, or to Google, or to local stores to check prices. Instead, they go straight to Amazon for price comparisons. (Personal note: This rings true. If I find a price somewhere online or off, checking Amazon is a good way to check if the pricing is good, great, or way out of the ballpark.)

Which is interesting, in a sense, given the fact that retailers have shown a great deal of concern about showrooming: being used as a physical location for consumers to check out products. As much as that’s a concern, and it actually happens, Amazon is also being used as the national price checker of record.

In fact, it’s likely more than that. The percentage of sales influenced by online ratings and reviews is massive, as mentioned above. And the best place to do that for any random product that you’re considering purchasing? Amazon, which probably has more ratings and reviews than any other single site. There’s a reason Google is working on its shopping solutions.

More details, including on smartphone and tablet use in online and offline sales, in Baynote’s infographic:

photo credit: Oliver Ortega Chua via photopin cc

Pinterest has acquired Punchfork, the recipe and cooking social network with an eerily Pinteresty-looking style. As part of the acquisition, the Punchfork site, API, and mobile apps will “soon be retiring.” In other words, sayonara to the site — and to its community.

In a public announcement on the site, Punchfork CEO Jeff Miller said that moving the entire site and community to Pinterest made the most sense:

“We believe that a unified destination benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork team will focus on contributing to Pinterest as the premier platform for discovering and sharing new recipes and other interests on the web.”

Punchfork has built an audience for its beautiful images of meals and dishes — and the recipes that can help users re-create them. But it is not a huge one. The company has about 80,000 likes on Facebook and only has about 100,000 unique monthly visitors in the past six months, according to Compete.com.

Source: Compete.com

Punchfork.com unique monthly visitors

The big question: Whether submersing that small but passionate audience within the massive Pinterest beast will enable the community to grow — or die.

Here’s the full text of the Punchfork statement:

January 3rd, 2013

Dear Punchfork Community,

Today we are excited to share the news that Pinterest has acquired Punchfork!

Since launching in January 2011, our mission at Punchfork has been to help home cooks discover new, high quality recipes and share them with family and friends. It is a mission driven by a belief in the ability of web and mobile platforms to inspire our lives offline–at home, in our communities, and for Punchfork, wherever meals are shared.

To cooking aficionados, Pinterest needs no introduction. It stands as one of the fastest growing online services in history, and millions of people use it to find recipes every day. Pinterest is often described as a platform for inspiration, and we feel this aligns perfectly with the goals of Punchfork. We couldn’t be more thrilled to join forces with the Pinterest team in San Francisco.

Initially, support for Punchfork will continue, but we will soon be retiring the Punchfork site, API and mobile apps. We believe that a unified destination benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork team will focus on contributing to Pinterest as the premier platform for discovering and sharing new recipes and other interests on the web.

Our sincerest thanks to our community members, friends, and everyone involved with Punchfork since its launch.

See you on Pinterest!

Jeff Miller
CEO, Punchfork

And it’s one that many retailers haven’t yet woken up to.

“E-commerce retailers are used to a world in which they have products for sale, put them on the site, sell out, and take them down,” Curalate founder Apu Gupta told me yesterday. “But now all the stuff that people are pinning continues to live on Pinterest long after the products are gone. And we’ve discovered that once a product gets popular, it continues to get more popular.”

During the recent Black Friday weekend, Curalate reviewed a number of top retailers’ websites. The team was shocked to find that 48 percent of their top ten most popular products on Pinterest actually led to dead links — expired pages. The pages no longer even showed the product that had originally been pinned … much less offer it for sale. So when people — interested, eager consumers — see something they like on Pinterest and want to buy it, far too often they are clicking through to the original product website only to hit a brick wall, Gupta says.

And this isn’t just a problem for one or two year old pins. Brands like H&M and Forever 21 are built on rapid inventory turns, sometimes as quick as weeks or months. Even more traditional retailers typically turn their inventory over seasonally, meaning that products pinned just a few weeks or months ago could already have expired.

So what’s a busy retailer to do?

“It starts with handling 404s better,” Gupta said, referring to the error code a webserver engine returns for a page that cannot be found. “But also, if a product sells out … don’t take it down. Leave it on the site, so at least the page is there and consumers can maybe order it … get on a waiting list.”

Even if that’s not possible, there are alternatives.

“Or the page can say say that the product is out of stock, but here are some suggestions … maybe some other things that are on Pinterest from our brand that are getting really hot.”

Technologies to make this easy for retailers are available now, but e-commerce managers need to become aware of the possibilities. That’s what Curalate does, Gupta told me: Identify the products that are resonating with consumers, and highlight them to brands.

“Images are the new currency of social engagement,” Gupta says. “But as images replace words, brands can’t understand that … you can’t do a text search for images. We’re the first to be able to do that.”

As Pinterest continues to grow — and as perhaps 70 percent of its users visit the site to look for shopping inspiration — knowing how to manage old inventory and assess consumer demand in a very visual world becomes more and more important.

It’s not exactly a tit-for-tat swap, but around the same time Instagram pulled its photos from the Twitter experience, Pinterest pins started appearing inside tweets.

Pinterest formally added support for Twitter Cards within the last week, VentureBeat has confirmed. The release went live as a limited test early last week and received little fanfare until the Twitter-embedded pins were spotted by Pinterest aficionado Kelly Lieberman and the story was picked up by the Daily Dot.

The Pinterest-Twitter mashup means that whenever you post one of your inspirational pins to Twitter, the contents of said pin will appear inside your tweet. With pins inside tweets, people can see a preview of your fashion finds or holiday recipes without having to click through to Pinterest.

The integration leverages Twitter Cards, also known as expanded tweets. The functionality allows third-party partners to put their photos, news, videos, songs, and so forth, inside your tweets for immediate enjoyment.

Twitter has an arsenal of partners pumping content into your tweets, but Instagram is not one of them. The Facebook-owned property unceremoniously dropped support for Twitter Cards last week, citing a desire to drive people to its website for a better experience.

Is it just a coincidence that Pinterest pins have arrived inside tweets as Instagram photos have exited from them? Yes and no. Twitter and Pinterest certainly worked together on the integration, but that may be only because of how Twitter Cards is currently structured. Companies interested in employing Cards go through a formal approval process that requires Twitter to review the implementation before it goes live. Pinterest, however, may have chosen to speed up the implementation process and expand the test after the Instagram dustup.

Regardless, the Pinterest addition is good for Twitter. The more top-tier partners Twitter can get to use Cards, the better its chances are of keeping its members engaged on site or inside the mobile apps longer. Perhaps people may also start to forget what they’re missing.

Update: A Pinterest spokesperson said Thursday, December 13 that the company has ended its test of Twitter Cards. “We have now completed the test and are turning off the integration while we evaluate the results.”

Blue bird image via Shutterstock

With HootSuite Directory apps, social media content creators can create, publish, and promote social content all within one interface. For instance, the Vimeo app allows users to “upload videos, search for and view videos within the dashboard, share videos to your social network, and more,” according to HootSuite.

“At HootSuite we hold content creators dear to our hearts, so we’re thrilled to be able to bring tools like Vimeo and WordPress.org, staples of the creative community, into our App Directory,” HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes said in a statement.

HootSuite’s app directory just celebrated its first anniversary and now integrates with 41 popular web services such as Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and Slideshare. The company’s five million customers use the apps as well, with 10-15 percent of new users installing an app within the first week, according to Mark Holder, HootSuite’s director of integration partners.

The WordPress.org tool is particularly significant. WordPress is the biggest blogging tool on the planet, handling something like 17 percent of web traffic. The .org part refers to self-hosted blogs, but WordPress.com hosted blogs are also included.

And for those social media marketers who are turning to Pinterest to engage with fans, the Reachli app will be of interest. It helps marketers create campaigns and view metrics such as clicks, likes, repins, and total reach.

‘Tis the season for reflection — through data crunching, of course!

The folks at sharing platform AddThis have stepped up to the task and tallied a year’s worth of social shares on their platform to uncover 2012′s biggest takeaways.

Facebook was the most popular network in the realm of sharing and accounted for 51 percent of all shares during the year, according to data pulled from the AddThis platform, which reaches 1.3 billion unique users each month and tracks shares on more than 14 million domains.

A share is defined as any time a user shares a piece of content to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and so forth, from a site within the AddThis network. Tallied shares include those occurring through the AddThis menu, buttons, or copy-paste in the address bar, a spokesperson said.

Taking about 15 percent of the sharing pie, Twitter was a distant number two to Facebook, but it grew shares by 55 percent from last year. Meanwhile, Pinterest, the digital collector’s paradise, showed the most growth in shares; it closed the year with 379,559 percent growth, making it the fastest growing service since Facebook, by AddThis’ calculations.

MySpace, the in-transition site for creatives, unsurprisingly slid backward in 2012, and was down 62 percent in shares from last year.

Some other bits for your consideration: Tim Tebow was the most talked about athlete of the year, the U.S. election was the most shared event, the iPhone 5 was more buzzed about than its miniature cousin, and Batman was the most shared superhero flick in 2012.

Pinterest analytics and marketing company Pinfluencer announced this morning that 50 brands, including Gilt, Martha Stewart, and Shape Magazine ran Pinterest promotions on its platform, which launched in private beta in October. The brands boosted follower acquisition rates by 156 percent and pins/day by 125 percent.

Another company, JetSetter, ran a scavenger hunt that generated seven million impressions of the companies’ pins, according to JetSetter’s head of social, Jonathan Goldmann.

Facebook, on the other hand, noisily lost GM as an advertiser earlier this year and is currently struggling with how many brand messages users should see on the site … and how much companies should pay for the privilege. Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban, of course, very publicly dumped on Facebook just a month ago when he realized how few of his Dallas Mavericks followers actually saw any of the Mavs posts. Now Pinfluencer is showing companies just how to engage with followers on Pinterest — and boost both followers and viral views … and eventually sales.

Sharad Verma, Pinfluencer’s chief executive, talked to me a few days ago about his new platform, which has delivered 25 million total impressions for the 50 companies in the beta program.

“There are four types of promotions on Pinterest,” he said. “First, asking users to come to your website and pin the products they like; second: creating a board and pre-populating it with pins, asking users to re-pin; third: creating a scavenger hunt; and fourth: running daily winner contests for prizes for those who pin your content.”

Using them wisely, he said, is helping brands get a huge increase in followers and brand-associated pins. There’s a reason for that, according to Verma.

“Pinterest contests are fun and creative,” Verma told me. “They’re very open-ended, not forcing you to do something you wouldn’t want to do. You simply pin products from a website.”

And that in turn generates a lot of eyeballs, clickthroughs, and sales.

“This is better than Facebook. Facebook is really about conversation and brand awareness,” he said, adding that Pinterest drives sales.

Naturally, Verma has a vested interest in Pinterest: His entire company is built around the marketing and analytics for the site, which might make his impressions a little suspect. But he’s not the only one singing this song.

Separately, retailers such as Indigo have used Pinterest to drive increased social sharing and a 50 percent bump in sales from social traffic compared to other sources. And a wider sample of retailers found that Pinterest drives more revenue per click than Facebook or Twitter. More recently, RichRelevance found that while Facebook is still driving more clicks to retailers, Pinterest, which has started growing again after leveling off this summer, is where the big spenders are coming from.

Fortunately for brands that have invested in massive Facebook fan counts, Pinfluencer has a tool in its kit:

“Marketers can host their contests and sweepstakes on a Facebook tab powered by Pinfluencer and convert their Facebook fans into avid pinners on Pinterest,” Verma said in a statement.

Which means Pinterest certainly can be a part of any brand’s social story, even if that brand is already heavily invested in Facebook.

Microsoft’s fledgling social network is a bit of a puzzler. Pronounced “social,” Socl debuted to the public Tuesday with a fresh coat of paint, new features, and no clear purpose.

The product of Microsoft’s Fuse Labs research team, Socl was originally intended to appeal to educational communities — design students, for instance — and folks who are want to collaborate online in unconventional ways. A year into testing, Microsoft has invited newcomers to try out Socl and redesigned it to be more adept at helping people connect around shared interests.

My post on Boo, created with images from Bing search results.

At its core, Socl is all about search, but search dressed up in pretty, image-rich collections. Posts take the shape of photo collages that members put together from Bing search results around terms or topics. Each image, video, or search listing in a collage links to the original web source. Members can comment, tag, like (technically “:)” at), and share posts to other social networks. People can also “riff” on posts, which is a feature that looks to be like a more open-ended version of Twitter’s retweet. You can be inspired by a cat collage and then go on to make your own, for instance.

“Socl helps people find and share interesting web pages by extending the search metaphor, create rich posts by assembling montages of visual web content and provides rich media sharing and real time sharing of videos,” a spokesperson said. “We encourage users to reimagine how everyday communication and learning tools can be improved by researching, learning, and sharing in their everyday lives.”

As far as I can tell, Socl users enjoy making posts that contain collections of their favorite things, be they puppies, animated .gifs from “Gangnam Sytle,” or random maps of Switzerland. Learning, not so much. Some also seem to want to use Socl as a more traditional social network, which means they’re posting individual photos and text updates to opine on the world at the large.

Spend a few minutes in the free-for-all “posts” stream and you’ll come across many a collage that seems to exist without rhyme or reason, likely because it’s a little confusing as to what you’re supposed to do here. The idea of collecting items around topics and interests is one that Pinterest has already made popular. The search results-only element both simplifies and complicates Socl’s collection-inspired collages. Finding exactly what you want to add is a bit of a pain because you’re forced to work with just what Bing serves up. The easiest option, then, is the most boring: adding the first several images or articles that Bing returns. The end result are collages that look a lot like search results pages.

Socl also comes with a feature called “parties” that lets people participate in online video viewing parties. Parties seem tacked on, and are a very loose stretch on the whole interest-based search experience. It’s as if Microsoft needed to create a semi unique foil for Google+ Hangouts and this is what they came up with.

The overall aesthetic is quite appealing, but Socl strikes me as more novel than useful. People do, as history instructs us, seem to get a kick out of novelty on the web. Plus, my post of Boo photos and links racked up a few instant reactions, so there seems to be a small but engaged audience ready and willing to help Microsoft sort out of the point of Socl.

Both in the U.S and globally, people are accessing the web more frequently and for longer periods, using smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles, and smart TVs. We’re still using PCs as well, but personal computer usage of social media is just about the only category that’s down: 4 percent fewer Americans connected to the Internet via a PC in 2012, while 82 percent more connected via the mobile web and 85 percent more connected via a mobile app.

Source: Nielsen

Mobile app and mobile web use were both up — way up.

Overall, total time on the Internet in 2012 is up 21 percent to 520 minutes a month. A staggering 17 percent of that is spent on one service: Facebook.

And it’s social networks that are seeing huge growth, with 85.5 million accessing social networks via a smartphone or tablet app in July 2012 versus 44.8 million in July 2011, and 81.1 million using the mobile web in July 2012 compared to 43 million in July 2011. PC use is still the largest, with 171.8 million Americans using a laptop or desktop machine to get social online, but that’s just slightly up from 163.6 million in 2011.

Interestingly, while Facebook’s PC’s audience declined by 4 percent in 2012, Twitter’s grew 13 percent. Google+ grew 80 percent, and Pinterest grew 1,047 percent, but that has a lot more to do with the growth cycles of those two sites than transformative change in how users are accessing them. Facebook’s app audience increased by 88 percent, and its mobile web audience increased by 85 percent, more than offsetting the slight PC decline, and underscoring Facebook’s recent efforts to monetize its mobile services.

Another insight from Nielsen: Pinterest’s growth flattened — and even disappeared in early 2012. It had grown from an audience of perhaps 2.5 million in July 2011 to almost 25 million in February 2012, but it plateaued at that level for three months, and then actually decreased in May before taking off again in June.

Still, Pinterest is a massive force online, especially among women, who make up 70 percent of its web audience, 84 percent of its app users, and 72 percent of its mobile web audience — and spent about 2.1 billion minutes on the site in 2012.

The second-screen phenomenon is on the increase as well, as TV viewers continue to use Twitter as a way to sound off, comment on, and chat with others about what they are watching:

Almost a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds comment on social media sites about their TV shows while they’re watching, and the numbers are growing through 2012.

That’s a low percentage, globally, with 47 percent of people in Asia-Pacific countries using a second screen while watching TV, and a staggering 63 percent of people in the Middle East and Africa chatting online while watching.

The surveyors talked to 1998 U.S, adults, but the global component of Nielsen’s report surveyed 28,000 people in 51 countries.

The full report is available from Nielsen.

photo credit: ocean.flynn via photopin cc

Pinterest blocked traffic from Amazon and other websites on Black Friday last week, according to Pinfluencer, a Pinterest analytics service. Socialtimes reported today that extra holiday traffic — and suspected malicious activity — prompted Pinterest to refuse queries from the sites.

Update 9:38PM — Pinterest PR gave me the following statement:

During the holidays, we believe a third party was using Amazon Web Services to scrape our site so we temporarily blocked a specific traffic source, which is a common measure taken by web services. Some legitimate services may have been affected momentarily, but we do not believe that traffic to or from Amazon.com or other Amazon properties was impacted. 

Pinterest drives massive referral traffic that can drive impressive sales for online retailers. And though its growth has slowed in 2012, and the site is virtually ignored by small and medium-sized businesses, it is still on track to be the fourth-largest source of referral traffic on the web.

Amazon added Pinterest buttons to its website earlier this year (although it can be a massive where’s-Waldo exercise to find the social sharing buttons on Amazon’s busy pages). Presumably so many product pages were being viewed and shared by shoppers, Pinterest’s automated danger signals were activated.

The blockage lasted for 15.5 hours, from 11:30 PM on November 23th to 3PM on November 24th. Since Pinfluencer tracks pins, repins, likes, and comments, its services were affected as well.

I’ve contacted both Pinfluencer and Pinterest for more details, and will update this post as those companies respond.

photo credit: Thomas Hawk via photopin cc

TeePee Games announced a new website and smartphone app today that works like a Pinterest for gamers … well, sort of.

GamesGrabr, which is launching in early 2013, is a pinboard-style social network where gamers can find, create, and manage game collections. TeePee already helps users discover social, online, MMO, and mobile games through its online portal and Facebook app, and its Geronimo engine recommends new content based on each player’s gaming habits. GamesGrabr sounds like a step forward — a bigger and more connected way for both casual and hardcore gamers to share and keep track of their favorite items.

“Initially, yes, GamesGrabr uses a similar U.I. [user interface] to Pinterest in that images and videos can be ‘Grabed’ or ‘pinned’ from across the web and collected in users collections,” said Tony Pearce, the chief executive officer of TeePee Games. “However, we are focused on the users’ passion for games and building the first social network for gamers. We want to create a games social network where you can create games collections and share them with your friends. One of the best things about GamesGrabr is that you’ll be able to browse game collections created by other people and see what your friends are playing or follow other gamers with similar interests. GamesGrabr is a great way of discovering new games.”

Prospective users can sign up now, before the network opens early next year, for a chance to win an iPad Mini or Nintendo Wii U video game console — two hot items on holiday wishlists this year. They can also integrate their Facebook accounts with GamesGrabr and learn how the site works via a quick, interactive walkthrough that resembles a series of comic book word balloons.

Pearce says that members can post anything they like to GamesGrabr. The upcoming iPhone and Android app turns the device’s camera into a barcode scanner, which gamers can use to scan boxed video game products and upload them to their collection for friends to see, comment on, or buy with one click.

“We don’t just ‘pin’ in GamesGrabr — we ‘Grab,’” said Pearce. “Our unique GrabIt button does a lot more than just pull images or a video from a web page into a collection of your choice, but this will be announced at launch.” Pearce also said that users can install this button on their web browsers.

Affiliate deals with sister site TeePee Games mean that users can play thousands of games on the site. A deal with Apple will connect members with iPhone and iPad games, and one with Apple will enable them to easily purchase physical boxed products and accessories. Pearce said that developers and publishers can even create their own collections with screenshots, links, and details about their games, allowing users to follow them. They can also chat directly with members, who can also play or buy their games across any platform.

“We have created a great recommendation engine that will offer cross-platform games recommendations,” said Pearce, adding that it’s open to developers who want to contact them. “For instance, you might Grab a T-Shirt with a Space Invaders image on it. Our recommendation engine will then offer Space Invaders games and products or games similar to [it] to the user.”

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Pinterest today officially opened up to businesses, welcoming them with a promise to help them get the most out of their digital pin-board experiences.

Two-year-old Pinterest is the web and mobile service for collecting digital treasures and saving them to inspirational or aspirational boards. The startup, which only recently opened its doors to the public, today expanded its terms to officially allow businesses to use the product, though thousands were already doing so.

So what’s new exactly? A separate terms of service governs businesses. They also get a verification badge to prove legitimacy and Pinterest buttons to place on their own sites to get fans participating in the Pinterest experience with them. In addition, Pinterest promised its business users access to upcoming features.

The new Pinterest for Business site also supports new business account creation and helps companies convert their existing accounts over to business accounts. This site includes case studies from companies such as Etsy, Jettsetter, and Allrecipes to guide businesses on how to make the most of their boards.

If that doesn’t sound like a whole heck of a lot, that’s because it’s not. The business release is, well, all about business — Pinterest’s business.

Essentially, Pinterest has established a way to distinguish businesses from regular users. The distinction, however, is an important one; the startup looks to be laying the foundation to eventually release for-charge features and products — analytics or ad units, perhaps? — tailored to those in the commercial category.

Because some things are better kept to yourself, Pinterest today launched a new feature called “Secret Boards.” The boards allow members to pin in private for the first time.

Two-year-old Pinterest makes a popular web and mobile service for tacking digital goodies such as favorite recipes, home decor must-haves, and fashion finds to collections called boards. Today, the service is finally adding a way for people to collect and store these digital treasures without fear of public scrutiny.

“We hope that secret boards will make Pinterest even more useful,” the company announced in a blog post. “You can use secret boards to keep track of holiday gifts, plan a special event, or work on a project you aren’t yet ready to share with the rest of the world.”

Members can create the new private spaces at the bottom of their profiles on the web, or opt to add a new board as usual and toggle the “secret” button on. Users can also start Secret Boards from the bottom of the “Boards” tab in Pinterest’s iPhone and Android applications, so long as they’re running the most recent version of each app. Secret Boards can be used solo or members can invite select friends to pin in private with them.

Secret Boards are currently being rolled out to members as a test, the company said.

Top global brands such as Nike, Gucci, Starbucks, and Audi have gained over a million new followers in just the last three months. That means, according to a new study by business data analytics company Simply Measured, Instagram is fast becoming the “best of the rest.”

While Facebook and Twitter are the social marketing leaders with near full adoption — both are at 98 percent participation from the 100 leading global brands — Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are back in a pack of three. But while Google+’s 67 percent participation and Pinterest’s 63 percent still outweigh Instagram’s 54 percent, Instagram is growing at a much faster pace.

In just the last quarter, Instagram has jumped 35 percent, while Google+ has only grown a miserly 5 percent. Pinterest is in the middle of the pack, at a trailing-but-still-healthy 24 percent.

That adoption and growth is surprising, given Instagram’s complete lack of focus on brand or corporate support: no admin pages, no brand profiles, no verified accounts. And, of course, it is the only major social network — over 100M users — that is mobile-only.

One major benefit, however, is Instagram’s close integration with Facebook, which allows users’ Instagram likes to be cross-posted on Facebook. And, given Instagram’s simple sharing features, brand owners often post directly to Facebook and Twitter from Instagram. 60 percent of Instagram photos, Simply Measured says, are shared to Twitter automatically, and 90 percent are published to Facebook.

One warning to brands still wondering about Instagram: eight brands control 92 percent of the consumer engagement on the mobile social network. Waiting any longer will only tend to prolong that circumstance.

Top brands on Instagram:

Source: Simply Measured

MTV, Starbucks, Burberry, Nike, Gucci, Tiffany, Audi, and GE are the top brands on Instagram

photo credit: Dirk Dallas via photopin cc

Block away, people of Pinterest. The digital pinning sensation has finally added a feature to help its burgeoning population block unwanted followers from stalking their every post.

Two-year-old Pinterest provides digital pinboard for people to “pin” projects and other interesting things on. The site has attracted more than 20 million members (despite only opening its doors to the public two months ago), which means its also likely attracted its fair share of trolls, haters, and angry exes.

It announced two new features Wednesday to improve and safeguard the experience for its membership: block a user or report a user. Previously, Pinterest allowed its pinners to report content but not people.

Should a member block another user, both parties are prevented from following each other’s boards, liking pins, repining, or commenting. Should someone report another person’s entire profile, the user can specify a reason for the report, such as hateful speech, and an alert goes to the company’s Community team for review.

The new options, rolling out to the web app this week, are accessible from a person’s profile; they’re listed in a menu that appears on click of the flag icon. And fear not, the newly blocked person is not notified of the action taken against them, Pinterest said.

“We care about control because we understand it helps to personalize your experience,” Pinterest software engineer Dannie Chu wrote in a blog post.

Pinterest also introduced additional email controls Wednesday for changing notification options on a more granular level. Members inundated by notification emails from the social site will likely welcome this update.

Altogether, the improvements amount to incremental changes that seem belated for a site as popular as Pinterest. But for those who want more control (don’t we all?), now you have it.

Photo credit: Pinterest

“We’re providing one of the missing pieces between Pinterest and commerce,” Ubokia VP Matt Pine told me. “Pinterest is an amazing site, but there’s a huge gap between discovering something great and purchasing it.”

Pinterest, which has continued its torrid growth this year by reaching 29 million visitors in July, has shied from aggressively monetizing its massive success … aside from a brief flirtation with undisclosed affiliate links. Instead, the company seems to prefer to grow its userbase before overtly monetizing by, for instance, providing links to stores where Pinterest users could purchase products featured on the site.

That gap between see and buy is a problem, according to Pine. And Ubokia is solving it with a little button that you drag to your browser’s toolbar: the Want button. Pinterest users can now see something they like on the site, click the want button, and instantly create a request on Ubokia for exactly that item … all without leaving Pinterest.com.

Pine provides the example of a gift he wanted to provide to his girlfriend. Despite finding the exact bracelet on Pinterest, he had no way of actually finding a store online or off that sold it. But when he posted the want on Ubokia, several jewelry retailers — and a number of Etsy hobbyists — replied, giving him options to purchase.

“Pinterest is a discovery engine,” Pine says. “Ubokia is a want engine … and they can be very cool together.”

The match comes with a few caveats, of course.

Source: Ubokia

Ubokia’s pop-up window on Pinterest

Pinterest and Ubokia have no integration, although Pine says Pinterest knows what Ubokia is doing and “loves this.” That means Pinterest won’t make any money on sales generated via Ubokia, and it also means that Pinterest users won’t even know about the post-your-wants opportunity unless they find out from Ubokia.

And there are varying opinions about the utility of Pinterest for e-commerce, with some saying that the site drives more revenue per click than either Twitter or Facebook, others saying that Pinterest users are just window shoppers, and still others saying that 21 percent of Pinterest users have bought an item they found on the site.

But, no question, Pinterest is driving huge traffic to online retailers, and this Ubokia initiative may be a good test of the full e-commerce potential of the site.

And a full partnership between Pinterest and Ubokia may be in the offing, Pine hinted, depending on the success of this initiative.

Time will tell if that’s wishful thinking or accurate prognostication.

photo credit: ATIS547 via photopin cc

Most sensible people snag a serviceable set for $20, but are earbuds really the place to skimp? With smartphones, tablets, flights, fitness crazes, and on-the-go lifestyles people are consistently phoned in. For only $15 more you could improve your listening experience ten-fold! These Moxy earbuds are the closest you can get to bulky high-fi earmuffs, but at a fraction of the size and cost. Worried about durability? Bodyquardz replaces the generally cheap plastic of other earbuds with an ultra-lightweight aluminum encasement scientifically angled for a perfect fit and flawless sound that lasts. When not in use, toss them in the hard case and zip ‘em up for added protection.

The bass these little guys produce is incredible, and you don’t need to pump rap or techno to take advantage of it. Movies on your laptop or tablet sound as if you’re in a theater. The Moxy earbuds also include a mic so you can keep those hands free while on a business call or catching up with friends. A multibud tip kit is included as well to ensure the earbuds stay put our more outdoorsy, athletic fans.

Realistically, think about how frequently you utilize headphones. Considering earbuds as an object you insert into your head for multiple hours a day, is this really where you want to practice frugality?

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The power of pinning: Almost everyone knows they can’t afford to ignore social media these days and most businesses use Twitter and Facebook effectively, but what about the newest (and hottest) entrant to the game: Pinterest? It’s a powerful platform that a lot of companies still underutilize. That’s why we wanted to bring you this comprehensive Pinterest course that could enable you to create an effective pinning strategy to dominate your customers (and friends) Pinterest boards!

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Ik spreek geen Nederlands, but the roughly 30 million people who do should appreciate this news: social inspiration sensation Pinterest is now available in Dutch.

Pinterest is also now being offered in German, the company announced today. The additions up the total number of supported languages to seven, as the service is already available in English, two versions of Spanish, and two Portuguese dialects.

The language refresh underscores what everybody already knows: People the world round want to pin and repin — in their native tongues, no less.

Launched in 2010, Pinterest users collect virtual products on digital pinboards. The site has exploded in popularity despite having just opened its doors to the public and only recently launching applications for iPad and Android. Pinterest has already attracted more than 20 million members.

The up-and-coming social network still has a long way to go before it catches up to Twitter or Facebook, which are available in 33 and 70-plus languages respectively.

Photo credit: josef.stuefer/Flickr