Pinterest

Launched in early 2010, Pinterest is a unique type of social networking website. It is unique in that it is unlike the norm, or your average social networking site. Unlike Facebook, unlike Google+, Twitter, LinkedIn or any of the others in the plethora of social networking sites to come along in recent years.

Social networking sites are a great way to keep in contact with friends, family, co-workers or anyone else who wants to remain in touch with you. It is also a great way to track down those who seem to have “fallen off the face of the earth” so to say.

There is a wide range of different types of these websites, for instance, you have Facebook; a general purpose social networking website that is great for just keeping up with what is going on in the lives of those who are close to you, or even those who aren’t. Then you have professional social networking sites. This type of site in geared more toward the professional who wants to expand his network of clients and is also a good place to advance your career when you know how to use it the right way. Twitter and Google+, although they each have their own individually different styles of format, both pretty much just fall into the same category as Facebook. That is not to say that Twitter or Google+ are any less useful than Facebook, just slightly less popular. (but then, what website isn’t at least slightly less popular than Facebook these days.)

This brings us to our main topic, Pinterest. Now, Pinterest is somewhat in a category all it’s own. I say somewhat because there are other sites out there that are somewhat similar to Pinterest, however, Pinterest, when you delve into it’s place among social networking sites, forms its own category. It almost fits into the Facebook type of social networking website, but not quite. Then it almost fits into what’s called a bookmarking website, but once again, not quite. Of course there is a layout to your page, you don’t just go pinning up websites all “willy-nilly”. Users are allowed to create theme based categories for their collections of favorites. Let’s say that you have a hobby, knitting, you can start a collection of websites labeled, you guessed it, hobbies and pin up whatever site that you found that interest you, related to your hobbies, of course. Then, let’s say that you are into politics, that’s right a section for your favorite political websites. Well, you get the idea. Pinterest is quite unique, it is what’s considered a “pinboard style social photo sharing website”, but it is much more than that. With Pinterest you can pin up pages from your favorite websites. You can also follow your friends, just like you can on many of the other social networking websites. Once you follow someone, it is now up to that person whether or not they want to follow you back. When you do follow someone, however, you can then view their favorite sites that are pinned up on their Pinterest page. In this respect, this is what sets Pinterest apart from other social networking websites.