Oh Social Media you Hooked Me Again
By Julie D. Sanders, Xapsis Director of Client
Services
Maybe you've heard of this little website called
Pinterest? My guess is that you have
because it has been taking over the social media world lately. I myself have
been hesitant to dive in, because frankly there are only so many hours of the
day, and I am already hooked on all other forms of social media(i.e.
time-suckers). I mean how good could it be?
I'm here to tell you that it is a little slice of heaven. Really!
I'm type of gal who likes to be hip and on the cutting edge of
technology… but mostly technology doesn't love me back. Twitter and I are
fighting right now as we speak because I can't understand hashtags, but
Pinterest is simple. It focuses on one
thing, visual bookmarking/sharing and they have made sure they are awesome at
it. It doesn’t overwhelm the user. For example, in my free-time when I should
be thinking about how to engineer world peace what I'm actually doing is
gleefully pinning and re-pinning things to my boards, and often giggling like a
little girl.
A picture still speaks a thousand words, even in the technology
world. Personally, I love a good picture
and especially a good photo gallery, that is one of things that made me fall in
love with the internet long ago. People
like to look at the images they like again and again. And share them,
re-share them, and re-share them again. This is where Pinterest becomes genius
because you can share these images and arrange them artfully. So my inner organizational freak is doing a
happy dance. The designers at Pinterest have done a fantastic job of taking
something that could be overwhelming, both in general and visually, and making
it a joy to experience.
Pinterest is more than just a place to store and share images. The
images link back to the orignial site you found them on so you end up with an
organized, visual bookmark back to sites you found interesting. More importantly they link you directly to
information that you might actually use
in your real-world life. This makes Pinterest more than just a bookmarking
service, and more than just an image-sharing service. It makes Pinterest a
best-of-both worlds tool that is useful to you both on and offline. It helps
you to find, share, save and use things
that are of interest to you. You can actually find, share, and utilize things
that are customized for you, by you.
I recommend giving Pinterest a try. You’ll probably love it.
