‘Pinterest’ an American Image Sharing Service Designed to Enable Saving and Discovery of Information on the Internet Using Images in the Form of Pinboards

Pinterest is a visual bookmarking tool for saving and discovering creative ideas. It helps its users to discover and do what they love–including recipes, arts and crafts, clothing, and home projects. Its site and app allow its users to save and post images on different boards, categorized and curated to each user’s individual tastes. Users can also follow boards created by other users and re-post (or “pin”) items to their own boards.

Pinterest grew to become an $11 billion business by focusing relentlessly on the company’s users, not the users it thought it should have. What’s fascinating about Pinterest is that it was the first online product that leveraged how we interact with things in the real world to help users organize their digital lives.

In many ways, Pinterest was the exact opposite of Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat, everything which was hot at the time. Unlike these platforms, Pinterest focused on curating only images and not on real-time content. One of the major reasons this image platform became such a huge success was that users would hold regular meetings with their limited users in the beginning. In contrast, this was an unusual practice, which helped the platform grow as the online network’s ability to absorb its users’ changes.