DAILY

Pin-sanity?

With everyone else in New York honed in on the Lin-sanity related to New York Knicks player Jeremy Lin, I've decided to turn my focus toward another recent cultural obsession: Pinterest.

According to a story on NPR's Morning Edition, the virtual, personalized bulletin board website drew "more than 10 million unique visitors" to sign up for an account last month, which is pretty impressive considering all of the self-exploitation sites that already have rights to our limited attention spans- how do we all find the time?!

I love a good visual mock-up of ideas as much as the next person, but for some reason the ease of Pinterest irks me.  Now it seems that anyone can curate a collection of ideas and virtually represent their style simply by dragging an image to their Pinterest board- does the world really need more amateur curators on the web?

Perhaps if the social element was removed from Pinterest (which would be totally pointless), it's value, for me, would be restored because it would turn into more of a personal project that would mature over time. Right now, one's ideas are instantly available on their Pinterest board even if the idea is backed up only by a mere three seconds of thinking "Hey! That looks cool!"

Why is this instantaneous sharing of ideas and visual inspiration a bad thing, you may wonder? I guess it's really not if Pinterest can prove that its site has staying power, and that people are using Pinterest as a tool to make a meaningful impact in the real world (as opposed to virtual). But with most social web endeavors, including blogs, the fervor will spike initially when anyone and everyone jumps on-board, but it will eventually slim down to a more manageable and purposeful size, which takes nothing but time.

I guess the web has its own way of curating things.