<Read this article. For the sake of the Internet as we know and love it. SOPA/PIPA explained, and why it should matter to you.>
WARNING: This post is coming at you with a whole lot of snark, attitude, and a whee bit of Dayquil-infused fluff. Maybe, I just get an extra bit snarky when I’m under the weather? But, I can’t help but notice the sheer volume of posts about Pinterest lately.
In case you have been living under a rock, Pinterest is a site which lets you create boards where you can pin and share interesting photos. It’s clustered where you can easily discover users with similar boards/interests. Of course, you can acquire followers, get likes, and comment on others’ pins/boards. The site, which has been around for about a year, recently got a lot of attention in tech and social media blogs and sites. When that happens, every “social media blogger” hops on the Pinterest bandwagon and starts singing its praises on their respected blogs. Most of them with about as much credential to talk about it as the pins they are pinning.
To be clear, I have no problem with Pinterest. I think they have done a terrific job to get people on their platform, which is still invite-only. They have done an even better job to get tons of positive press coverage.
My problem is with how everyone is acting about it. People spend one day, one week or maybe one month on the site, and they are already calling it game-changing. Revolutionary even! Come on, people. Enough with all these buzzwords. We are better than this. Game-changing doesn’t happen when you have a site that has maybe five million users. And 60% of them are females in their 20s or 30s. No, game-changing is when you have a site with 600 million users. That’s truly global and impacts everyone.
Stop trying to make these new shiny sites game-changing. Pinterest isn’t the first time I’ve seen this happen. Let’s flashback almost a year ago to the day. Remember, Quora? Everyone thought that site was revolutionary and a Twitter and Linkedin killer. So far, it really hasn’t lived up to its grand expectations. That’s just one of many examples.
We are in such a hurry to find the “next game-changer.” That we so often forget about the present. We can’t control the future and what’s going to take off next. We can, however, control what we do in the present. Let’s plan and strategize for that. <end rant>
