Pinterest begins predicting your interests

Pinterest is one of the fastest growing and most user friendly social networking sites on the web today, but they’re clearly not satisfied with maintaining the status quo. Over the past few months they have been insistently adding new features to develop the experience and help users find more of what they want.

Their latest update is so noticeable you’ll wonder why it didn’t already exist. The new Pinterest Interests feature analyzes the things you’ve previously pinned and suggests other pins based on what you’ve expressed an interest in.

Best of all, Pinterest groups these personalized pins into categories so you can browse groups of pins suggested just for you, rather than the common list of categories you’re used to looking through.

To start Pinterest Interests, if you haven’t already, simply login to Pinterest and you’ll be prompted with this message on the home page.

Click on ‘Come See for Yourself!’ and you’ll be taken on a short tour through the fresh interests page called Explore.

This feature is obtainable only on the desktop site for now, but in the official announcement they state it will be rolled out to mobile and everywhere something like the world soon.

In the announcement they also admit steps needed to be taken in order to make the skill to find pins more relevant to each user.

Before today, all the billions of Pins on Pinterest were organized into just a handful of broad categories… We’re working hard to make Pinterest as applicable as possible for each person so it can be a place you can find and save all of the things you love, even if you didn’t even know you were looking for them.

Speaking from knowledge as a male using Pinterest, it can be very hard finding pins that pertain to my interests when browsing through the general categories. Pinterest Interests makes the knowledge much better. Here’s a glimpse of my Interests page, which is filled with amazingly true recommendations:

This is not only great for the average user, but if you use Pinterest for business it will help you find a more targeted audience of people to follow, and increases the chances of your pins being seen by them as well.

The Interests page will be constantly changing and promises to get even more accurate the more you use Pinterest. All the more reason to keep pinning.

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Pinterest buys VisualGraph to enhance Image Recognition

 Pinterest is refining its application capabilities with achievement of startup company VisualGraph, an image recognition and visual search platform. 

Many speculate this move not only primes Pinterest to be a premier image search engine, but also an ideal environment for advertising. 

Today, Pinterest's search functionality relies heavily on user-generated text and association of images into categories. And it works well, but it's not always the most relevant.

VisualGraph was co-founded by former Googler Kevin Jing who worked on Google's first image processing application reverse in 2004. VisualGraph will help Pinterest with image recognition beyond the standard arrangement by users.

 The two-man operation at VisualGraph will join Pinterest as part of the attainment.

VisualGraph gives examples of how its technology helps make sense of images; not least of which include cars, fashion, and textured objects.

It's no secret Pinterest is working on its monetization approach. This move could be one more step in delivering relevant ads to users in the future, perhaps starting with its "promoted pins" offering. It'll no doubt also aid in Pinterest's "related pins" feature.

VisualGraph will be Pinterest's fourth achievement, and one of many strategic partnerships it has leveraged to integrate itself into the daily life of web users everywhere. 

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Latest Pinterest iPad Update for increasing Speed Pinning and Sharing

Pinterest’s latest iPad upgrade is all regarding quantity over quality. Not saying this is a awful thing, I’m just telling you how it is.

The familiarity begins with a new interface that is modern and shiny. The bottom navigation buttons make it easy to switch between the home view, search and pinning pages. But the real secret is in the new pinning sidebar.

Touch and hold anywhere on the page and you’ll get a wheel of circles. The options vary depending on where you are. If you’re on a board or an image close up that’s not your own, you get Pin It, Like, or Send. Send opens the sidebar so you can add a message and choose a beneficiary from Facebook or your iPad contacts.

If you perform the same touch and hold action on one of your own pins the options alter to Pin It, Edit or Send. Pin It lets you add it to another board. Send is the same as above. Edit opens the sidebar so you can add or change the description field. You can also switch boards or erase from here but there doesn’t appear to be an option to change the URL. 

I found the edit tool to be clunky on the iPad but it will do for a fast fix.

Again, the whole point of this menu is to support quick pinning and sharing. You can plow through dozens of photos in your feed, liking and pinning with fast finger flicks and you never have to open or close a new page.

Sometimes when you touch and hold you get a light bulb icon which takes you to related pages. This is wonderful for discovery but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work consistently.

Overall, this update should encourage shoppers to pin and share even more photos than ever. The only downside is that pinning isn’t buying. Personally, I think speed is your enemy if you’re trying to get consumers to convert. If brand recognition is your goal, then you’re good to go.

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Pinterest Launches Its initial API

 Pinterest has been busy recently with characteristic releases like related pins, promoted pins, and now this: dedicated Pinterest pages on brand websites showcasing the pins that are trending in the order of the brand on Pinterest. 

Pinterest explained in its announcement:

Now, when you go to AllRecipes.com in search of Thanksgiving recipes, you’ll see the most popular recipes on the home page, chosen by fellow Pinners. Or, if you head to Zappos.com to get started on your holiday shopping, you can browse in-demand products. Need a good book to read while you’re curling up at the fireplace this season? Go to RandomHouse.com to see the books Pinners are enjoying most.

Not all brands are handling the pages in the same way. The API plus a little creativity means these pages can be modified.

The pages will keep up-to-date information and preserve the social elements of Pinterest.

From Pinterest:

The Pins on these sites and mobile apps will frequently update, so you always see what’s trending. If you see something you like, you can Pin it right from the site without having to take a smash from shopping, reading or browsing.

For now, Pinterest says it's working with a choose group of brands for this feature, but no doubt it will open up to all Pinterest users if they see positive results.

For some users, this will be their introduction to see what Pinterest does. But really, the main intention is this benefits our partners, to help them better surface their content and make it easier for people using Pinterest to find out great content.

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Pinterest Adds Related Pins for Better innovation

Pinterest is adding "related pins" to users' home feeds, in a bid to pick up its discovery features and pin-based recommendations.

The pinboard-style photo-sharing website realizes that it is at present difficult for some users to find pins that they like, so it hopes the new related pins will sort out the problem.

"One of the things we hear from pinners  is that it sometimes takes some work to find fresh pins you love," the company said in its blog. "To make things a little easier, we're going to start delivering a collection of recommendations called 'related pins' right to your home feed."

The new related pins will be similar or linked to posts that users have previously saved or liked across Pinterest. The pins will also come with a thumb up and thumb down feature so pinners can give feedback and pick up the relevance of the pins over time.

If the user is unhappy with some of the recommendations, they can rate the pin by beating the info icon. Pinterest will then remove this pin from the feed and will avoid showing similar content in the future.

Pinterest says that the new related pins are diverse from promoted pins, which are essentially promtional ads for businesses.

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