Don't worry, Pinterest fans: Your sprawling virtual pegboards of wedding
dresses, handmade jewelry, craft projects and food porn haven't changed
dramatically. They're just easier to manage.
The popular link- and
photo-sharing website has rolled out an update, one offering people
simpler navigation and new ways to arrange their boards to fit their
needs. Although the haphazard spirit of Pinterest remains, the site is
much less overwhelming.
I wasn't a Pinterest user before, so the
redesign gave me a chance to take a good look at the site for the first
time. Before that, I had refused to be sucked into yet another form of
social media. I figured I didn't have much use for it.
In the
months since I started testing out Pinterest's new look, though, I've
found the service helpful in organizing and sharing my continually
expanding recipe collection. And it's fun to check what other people
around the world are looking at and to see which strangers choose to
follow me or respond to what I'm sharing.
Although it is not a
replacement for Facebook or Twitter, and doesn't pretend to be, it is a
beautiful and vast world with more than 25 million users around the
world.
For those who have never used Pinterest, the free site lets
people "pin" pictures from websites they want to share on online peg
boards. You can choose to share the boards with just a few close friends
or the entire Pinterest world. Others can comment on the boards and
pins, "like" them or repin items on their own boards.
The result
is an eclectic mix of millions of boards spanning just about as many
topics. Although it doesn't offer as much of a chance to communicate and
debate the way Facebook and Twitter do, Pinterest is an interesting and
often beautiful supplement to those social media networks.
Pinterest's
recent redesign is intended to cut down on clutter and make the site
easier to manage, without drastically changing its look. The new look
continues to evolve. Most of the changes are very subtle, and some have
been tweaked or reversed already, helping Pinterest avoid the kind of
backlash that Facebook has weathered in the past. Pinterest promises
even more updates in the weeks and months ahead.
One of the most
noticeable changes so far is Pinterest's move to larger pins, so you get
four rather than five items per row. The site looks cleaner and less
overwhelming because you don't see as many items on the screen at once.
Much of the text previously found on Pinterest boards is smaller or
gone. Menus have been streamlined.
What impresses me most about
Pinterest - and also what drove me crazy - is its vast variety. Although
there's no shortage of boards devoted to food, clothing, gadgets and
home decor, there are also ones devoted to obscure topics such as doors,
hockey goalies and the character Daryl from the TV show "The Walking
Dead."
Some boards are very artistic and personal, while others,
like mine, are more practical than pretty. The possibilities are
endless, and so is the potential for wasting time - another reason I
held off on joining for so long. Basically, whatever you're obsessed
with, there's something on Pinterest for you.
For me, that's food.
I
have hundreds of food-related sites bookmarked on my work and home
computers, plus my iPhone and my iPad. They cover healthy recipes geared
toward using up ingredients from my weekly farm share, tips for cooking
a filet mignon and lists of New York restaurants with the best ramen
and pizza. Other people have shared everything from the most ornate
wedding cakes to those old-fashioned casseroles held together with
canned soup.
Pinterest became a handy way to organize all that.
First, I set up a Pinterest board simply titled "Recipes." That quickly
spawned separate boards for easy meals, desserts and New York City
restaurants. Although they pale in size so far to many of the countless
other recipe boards out there, I find myself adding a couple things
every day as I browse Twitter, Facebook and, of course, other Pinterest
boards.
The boards also serve as a handy way for me to share
recipes. Want my go-to red velvet cake, mac and cheese and turkey chili
recipes? They're all on my Pinterest page. It also gives me easy access
to my recipes when I need them. Rather than emailing myself links to
recipes that I've bookmarked on my office computer, I can just pin them
to my board and open up it later on my iPhone as I walk through the
grocery store or on my iPad as I stir something on the stove.
After
just a few months, some of my boards have grown pretty large. The new,
less cluttered version of Pinterest helps me find what a need a little
faster.
The activity feed, which details who likes and repins your
pins along with other information, is in the process of moving to a
drop-down menu on the right-hand side, clearing more space for the pins
and their often beautiful photos. Its content is expanding as well.
Notifications go back further in time than what users previously saw.
Filtering
boards and pins by topic, such as "Art," "Food & Drink" and "Geek,"
is now easier, too. Instead of one long list dropping down from the
middle of your page, the categories fall from the upper left in three
shorter columns. It's a simple change that makes the list less daunting
to read through. Meanwhile, all of the profile and account settings have
been consolidated in a dropdown menu on the right.
A plethora of
new information also pops up now when you take a close-up look at a pin.
To the right of the pin is a mini version of the board it came from,
which you can scroll through. There is a mini board showing other pins
from the same website, so you can discover related recipes, for
instance. Below all of that is a collection of pins from people who
pinned the pin you're looking at. It's a way to discover material from
like-minded people. It's a lot of content on one page, but surprisingly
manageable.
Pinterest has also boosted its search capabilities, so
that when you start typing something in the search box located in the
upper-left corner of the page, a list of suggested words appears below
it. That's helpful if you don't know exactly how to spell something.
But
some popular features have also been eliminated. Gone is the site's
"originally pinned by" feature, which showed which user was the first to
pin a certain item. But Pinterest notes that many users have requested
its return. I wouldn't be surprised if it did. Based on user feedback,
Pinterest has already brought back other features, including one that
allows users who have just pinned something to look at related pins or
go straight to their pin by clicking on its "see it now" button.
What
makes Pinterest different from other social media services is that it's
not so much about posting your opinions or even letting your friends
know about what's going on in your life. Instead of creating new
content, it's about sharing and organizing what's already out there,
preferably content that's attached to cool photos.
You get a beautiful visual experience and links to just about everything online right now.
If
that's something you're interested in, you might want to give the new
and improved version a shot. Just don't spend too much time at the
office looking at recipes for 1950s-style casseroles made with
cream-of-whatever soup. It's 2013, after all.
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