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SALT LAKE CITY — There's Facebook, there's Twitter, and now we can add Pinterest to the list of popular social networking sites. The website is fairly new, but it's exploding in popularity, especially in Utah.
Pinterest is a place where you can collect and organize images that inspire you. Think of it like an online inspiration board. In fact, your Pinterest page is made up of several boards you title and create.
For instance, in my account there's a fashion board, a home décor board and a quote board. People can re-pin my pictures and add them to their own collection. That's where the craze gets started.
It's a creative tool, but for many people, particularly women, it's also a creative obsession.
Since its launch in May of 2010, Pinterest has quickly become one of the fastest growing social networks on the web. It currently has 17 million users, and it was recently named as a top five referrer of traffic, surpassed only by names like Facebook and YouTube.
Blogger Jane Rhodes, of See Jane Blog, says, "Pinterest has changed the world's creativity, I believe. It's taken it from a really cluttered, chaotic scene to something that requires nothing that we hold or have, but it's online and it's beautiful."
Rhodes is a popular lifestyle blogger. Simply stated, Pinterest has changed the way she works.
"I tend to use it as a tool where if I'm planning something or doing something, it's the first resource I use now," she says. "I definitely have had some late nights, where maybe I get the kids in bed at 10 o'clock, and then it's two o'clock."
She's not alone; there are a lot of online "night owls" out there. Since its launch in May 2010, Pinterest has quickly become one of the fastest growing social networks on the web. It currently has 17 million users, and it was recently named as a top five referrer of traffic, surpassed only by names like Facebook and YouTube.
It's no surprise that roughly 80 percent of users are women, and Utah is the "king pin" — we use the site more than any other state.
It's a creative outlet, sure, but also a potential business boom. Take, for example, one picture Rhodes uploaded. The image was pinned by Naomi Davis, who's a blogger in New York. From there it went crazy on Pinterest, being re-pinned hundreds of times from people all over the country - sending those eyes back to her blog.
It's a fun cycle to track, a fun trend to try, and one that is not going away anytime soon.
"It's clean, it's user friendly, it's there. It's going to be a Google and a Facebook, and it's right up there," Rhodes says.
Interesting to note: one of the developers of Pinterest is from Provo, Utah.
