StudioTalk: Wellington Web Design and Branding Blog

Pinterest, the pinboard-style social photo sharing website that allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections such as events, interests, hobbies and more. Users can browse other pinboards for inspiration, ‘re-pin’ images to their own collections and or ‘like’ photos. Pinterest’s mission is to “connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting” via a global platform of inspiration and idea sharing. Pinterest allows its users to share ‘pins’ on both Twitter and Facebook, which allows users to share and interact with a broad community. Founded by Ben Silbermann, of West Des Moines, Iowa, the site is currently managed by Cold Brew Labs and funded by a small group of entrepreneurs and inventors. It is one of the “fastest growing social services in the world.” bringing in more referral traffic than YouTube, Reddit, Google+ and LinkedIn.

But according to digital analytics company comScore, the popular site has showed some signs of slowed traffic from unique visitors. Although the number of unique visitors is still up compared to recent months, Pinterest brought in unique visitors at a lower growth-rate during the February to March time period compared to January to February.

Pinterest is now the number three most-popular social network in the U.S., behind Facebook and Twitter, according to Experian Hitwise. Experian rep Matt Tatham says Pinterest beat its next-closest competitor, LinkedIn, in total visits in February. Tatham says the rankings by total visits for March is as follows:

• 1. Facebook: 7 billion
• 2. Twitter: 182 million
• 3. Pinterest: 104 million
• 4. LinkedIn: 86 million
• 5. Tagged: 72 million
• 6. Google+: 61 million

The report, which tracks visits rather than unique visitors, is based on web traffic and doesn’t factor in visits from mobile sites. According to Experian’s reckoning, Foursquare only got 2.9 million visits in March and Instagram got 10.2 million.

Development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched as a closed beta in March 2010. The site proceeded to operate in invitation-only open beta.

Don’t you hate it when you post a link or video on Facebook and it decides to show your old pictures or thinks that your newly-launched website is all about “Under Construction, coming soon!”? Well we do, and as a web-development agency, it is important to understand and resolve the quirks and tricks of working with social media networks.

There is a nifty tool known as the ‘Facebook De-linter‘, which does make sense. Effectively it shows you what your website looks like, in Facebook’s eyes. But most importantly it also updates the Facebook cache to reflect your newest page content. So if you’re having trouble getting Facebook to recognise your new web content, throw your website into the De-linter!

Visit the Facebook De-linter.

www.newzealand.com

New styles of presenting websites are taking shape, especially with the introduction of new technologies of CSS3 and HTML5. One-page websites have their limitations, but this particular website has one of the best site introductions I have seen in a long time.

The new (launched mid-2011) 100% New Zealand Tourism website, give it a peep here: www.newzealand.com

Facebook is always making changes to keep us excited and attentive to our profiles and pages. Often these changes are minimal tweaks to layouts and new applications, but there’s a big change that I think will change the way we look at the social media environment.

Since the dawn of the ‘Blog Era’, we have been able to delve into archives of posts, events, photos and videos to relive moments from the past in a moderately logical manner. But the concept of a visual timeline representing an archive of information has been left to museum displays.

Facebook Timeline

Facebook has recently announced Timeline. Timeline is going to work much how it sounds; by organising your posts, photos and videos into a visual timeline. In addition you have more control over how your timeline looks with a giant banner at the top.

To many this will be just a nifty new Facebook feature whose novelty will wear off in three post’s time, but how will it be useful to businesses and all those fanpages? Well that will be the real test of it’s success and I can’t wait to try it.

Keep an ear to the ground and StudioTalk for more news on the topic, or click here to find out more about building traffic to your website with social media.