Like the other 10 million of you, I’ve spent some time pinning away on Pinterest. I now understand why the service is 90% women, because most dudes are not going to pin anything unless its girls, guns, stuff with engines or showing off their man caves. Women, on the other hand, have found the new new thing.
My take on Pinterest is that its smacks of a fad. While they have absolutely stunning recent growth, at its core its a digital corkboard. Great traffic driver for brands, sure, but really, the media is doing its job pimping Pinterest, so lets all relax and see how the stats are in six months. I thought StumbleUpon was a fad as well, and look at how well they have done as a site discovery service.
Of course I and a few friends started trying to pin photos of singles on Pinterest. Here’s the Match search, its not a board though. My Match profile shows up, so do some profiles from Spark Networks.
Could Pinterest drive traffic to dating sites? Even without any dating-specific features, the ability to browse singles as a gallery is compelling to a lot of people. Adult sites could crush it on Pinterest as well. Fling.com is probably freaking out about how easy it will be to drive traffic with their amazing geo-targeted lead-generators.
Pinterest is social discovery done right. The problem is that singles don’t belong on Pinterest. Its going to dilute what makes Pinterest so useful and fun. And it will invariably devolve into a lot of dating sites spamming people with photos of young women with side cleavage galore.
Pinterest has a spam problem heading their way, from about 100 different vectors. I wish them the best of luck staying out ahead of the spammer arms race. As for profiles on Pinterest, what do you think?
