Too Much Interest in Pinterest

It's almost 6p.m. I have currently spent the last hour looking at "pins" on the website Pinterest. The best way to explain this website is that it is much like a Facebook, but using images and captions as a means of sharing thoughts, ideas, funny links, pictures of food etc.


As you can see in this photo, the images or sites you post from the internet show up as a thumbnail with a caption. You can see how many people have re-pinned each post. If you click on the thumbnail, it will take you to a page, make the photo larger and show you the site source.

Pinning from across the web is made easy with a "pin it" button easily dragged and placed into your bookmarks (for using the web browser Chrome there are two short steps found under the about tab). For Pinning your own links, you create Boards. Your Boards are a means of organizing the links you pin. For example: I love the new Florence + the Machine song. I found the YouTube link, and pinned that video to my "Music I <3" Board.
There are two aspects of Pinterest I do not like:
1. It can usurp hours of my day without knowing it.
2. It is mostly populated by women.

That is not to say men are not on Pinterest, but there are simply a much larger population of women sharing photos and links on this site. From my personal experience, this means there are a lot of sappy, cliche links posted on Pinterest. I find myself moving further and further away from reading the posts of the people who I actually know, and seeking out other interesting links from individuals I don't know.

Overall, Pinterest is an interesting take on the social media world. We are bombarded with information day in and day out, but now we are able to save the sites, stories, photos, ideas and thoughts we love and not only keep them for our own enjoyment, but to share with others. So for the men out there - get on and start sharing! I want to live in a more gender balanced Pinterest world!