Winners Are Pinners

By Gerald McGrew on April 18, 2012 in Other

‘Pinterest’ is not the pursuit of penetration by sharp objects.

It’s a website, and if you haven’t heard of it yet, you will soon. As the new darling of the online scene, it’s experiencing massive growth. It’s the fastest independent website ever to achieve 10 million unique visitors per month, and directs more user traffic to other sites than Google+, LinkedIn and YouTube combined. And 97% of people who ‘liked’ the Pinterest Facebook page are women.

That is heavy stuff; so what is Pinterest?

It’s literally an online pin board where people post pictures of stuff they love. It’s basically a way of collating all the shit you like or want into the one spot, and people can then look at that shit and re-pin it onto their Pinterest page, then someone else might re-pin it onto their Pinterest page and so on. Often the pictures link to somewhere you can buy them online. So it’s basically a website where you can display and share the clothes you don’t wear, the house you don’t own and the body you don’t have.

No wonder the e-commerce game loves this one – there’s never been a website that pushed the human button marked ‘aspirational’ so well. And all of that stuff you don’t have is easy to find, visually categorised, looking sweet… and just one click away from being your latest credit card debt.

Speaking of debt, I saw with interest (geddit?) that Gerry Harvey was at his predictable best recently. He slagged us all off for not spending enough – presumably at his stores – and said that the struggling retail sector was copping it as a result. Then he announced he was scaling back his e-commerce ambitions, presumably as it’s taking up valuable time he could spend putting a guilt trip on people trying to pay their credit card off. Wait until he gets a look at Pinterest – he’ll crap his Stubbies.

And what fits perfectly in the front pocket of a pair of Stubbies? The new Raspberry Pi computer, yours for just $25, that’s what. It can run Windows, games, spreadsheets and word processors, plays hi-def video and is designed to be programmed by children. The catch is it doesn’t have a keyboard, a monitor or a case, but for less than a round of drinks at any overpriced Sydney pub it’s heralding the future of cheap computing. In years to come our kids will look at pictures of iPads and wonder what the hell we were thinking using something so ridiculously large and ‘unprogrammable’. Of course, by then the idea of a $25 computer won’t really be Gerry Harvey’s problem, but you can bet it will be playing on his cryogenically frozen mind.

This month has also been a bit special because the new iPad 3 was unveiled. The amount of pre-release postulating, speculating and general frothing by Apple fans is always something to behold. This time the new iPad will have a brighter screen – holy shit, throw the old one out right bloody now! It will also have a better camera – great news for all those people you see holding their iPads up to take photos.

It was also rumoured to have stereo speakers but it seems that this was too hard. I guess I’ll just have to listen to the ones in my 1974 HQ Holden!