If you launch with a small, dedicated group of interesting people that can asymmetrically follow each other, along with a global feed of all content posted, you can feel like you are the member of an interesting and vibrant community. […] Pinterest and Instagram followed the Twitter blueprint of asymmetric follows + global feed to scale from a small critical mass of interesting people into a massive, global community. […] Anti-network effects occur when a community which has already achieved critical mass begins to lose value with each additional signup. The reason is that the core community that created the value to begin with starts to get marginalized and leaves.
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Pinterest’s small team of 20 people is not driven by engineering. The company is split into three divisions: Engineering, design and social — with “social” a combination of quantitative people and community people, who try to understand how and why people use Pinterest, how social groups form and how social norms propagate.
— Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann’s Lesson for Start-Ups: Go Your Own Way
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[Pinterest founder] Silbermann watched user behavior on Tote. As the app was being used, he recognized that women were grabbing, tagging specific items that they were able to view later when they got home. What Silbermann saw was that huge numbers of people were grabbing items and sharing them with friends. He recognized that these women were sharing their tastes.
This led to Silbermann providing Tote users with a tool to organize those items and interests. That tool became very useful and was the early incarnation of Pinterest.
— Pinterest’s First Investor Explains the Secret to the Startup’s Success
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Pinterest is conducive to sharing. There’s a very low barrier to sharing [pins] with everyone who is following you.
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80 percent of all pins are re-pins, meaning that an overwhelming majority of content shared on site is recycled between users. […] For comparison, just 1.4 percent of tweets were retweets at a similar time in Twitter’s history— Pinterest keeps and engages members better than Twitter, data shows
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Having rolled out Timeline at the end of last year, Facebook followed up in mid January by letting third-party apps integrate with the reverse-chronological scrapbooking feature. Apps like Pinterest, Yahoo News and Fab began letting you post stories that stay as permanent reminders of news stories, designs, photos or anything else that you experience via a web or mobile app.
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As Facebook likes to say about everything it does, this is just early days for Timeline apps — in this case it’s particularly true, because the feature is so new. So developers, particularly people trying to drive traffic and sales through evergreen content that people identify with closely, think about ways to plug into this new usage.— A Month In, Facebook Timeline Brings New Growth For Myspace, Yahoo News, Pinterest, And Others
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Pinterest just hit 11.7 million unique monthly visitors, crossing the 10 million mark faster than any other standalone site in history. […]
This proves the power of the interest graph, and could convince more startups to build around what people care about instead of the social graph of who they care about.
— Pinterest Hits 10 Million Monthly Uniques Faster Than Any Standalone Site Ever
