Rainbow-speckled, cake batter Rice Krispies treats. A hot-pink-sequined electric kitchen mixer. A tiny dog happily sipping an iced Starbucks coffee. These are just some of the photos one can find when browsing the new online phenomenon, Pinterest.
24-year-old Janelle Vreeland of Old Town has something rather different on her Pinterest account: a black-and-white collage of silent film and classic Hollywood’s leading ladies. Joan Crawford, Elizabeth Taylor, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Bacall. The individual frames display close-ups of every actress. But not their entire faces, mainly their eyebrows. Each dark arch perfectly sculpted and sitting above mascara-decorated eyes.
Vreeland, who is “obsessed” with this era of film after watching Red Skelton and Shirley Temple movies with her grandparents, is fascinated by the photos, specifically how such a simple and unnoticed feature made the women so distinct. Through Pinterest, she is not only able to share this picture with fellow enthusiasts, but also her love for early cinema. She is not the only one mesmerized by the eyebrows. They have already been re-posted about 10 times.
Pinterest is a widely growing social media site that connects users based on their interests. With a virtual pinboard, members can display or “pin” images and videos they find on the web or their computers via a “Pin It” button installed on one’s Internet browser. Users may create multiple boards to organize their favorite recipes, home decorating plans, dream wedding ideas or anything else imaginable. And similar to Facebook, others can in turn generate comments, “like” or “repin” any content they see.
The concept behind the site stemmed from 29-year-old founder Ben Silbermann’s childhood hobby of entomology. “I collected insects maniacally,” he told USA Today. Always wanting to partake in Internet start-ups, such as Reddit and Twitter, the West Des Moines native soon realized that many share his passion for collecting, whether it is stamps or baseball cards. Thus, a site for showcasing such items was born.
When Pinterest first launched in March, 2010, it was not an instant sensation. “It was like stealth without us trying to be stealth,” Silbermann said.
But that is no longer the case.
Within the past several months, Pinterest has become an Internet craze. In mid-December, Experian Hitwise, a site for measuring online consumer behavior, reported that Pinterest received close to 11 million visits, which was 40 times the number of visits received in a single week just six months earlier. And comScore, Inc. (an Internet marketing research company) indicated that the virtual pinboard hit the 10 million visitor mark faster than any other standalone website, growing to 11.7 million unique monthly visitors at the beginning of February.
DePaul University’s assistant professor of new media and technology Paul Booth thinks Pinterest has reached the “magic point” and is on its way to becoming “valuable” to everyone. Not only does he view it as a form of sharing information and “actual things” (images and video), but he also sees it as a new way of highlighting the “best” material on the Internet. “There’s so much info out there, it’s getting impossible to find stuff,” he said.