If you’re a Pinterest user prone to drooling over your keyboard or mobile device each time you’re presented with an image of a tasty looking dish, you’ll be pleased to know that in some cases it’s now possible to pull up more information on those mouthwatering meals – information that could come in handy should you wish to get in the kitchen to make one yourself.
In a blog post Monday, Pinterest said it was introducing “more useful pins” to the social networking site, beginning with information-rich recipe pins, movie pins and product pins.
“When you find something you love on Pinterest, sometimes you want to learn more so you can act on baking those cookies, renting that movie, or buying that couch,” Pinterest software engineer Anna Majkowska wrote in the post. “That’s why we’re taking a first step toward making pins more useful.”
According to Majkowska, these new, more useful pins include:
– Product pins for things like clothes and furniture with pricing, availability, and where to buy
– Recipe pins from your favorite bloggers and websites that include cook time, ingredients, and servings
– Movie pins with content ratings, cast members, and more.
“From your feed, you can tell when a pin has more information by the icon that appears below the picture,” Majkowska wrote. “We’ll also update all of your old pins so they’re more useful, too.”
A cursory look through the list of companies that have signed up to be involved in the new feature at launch shows there’s some serious interest in Pinterest among big-name retailers and businesses, but then that’s hardly surprising considering the site has somewhere in the region of 50 million active users worldwide.
Recognizable names include, for example, eBay, Etsy, Sony, Target, Walmart, 101 Cookbooks, Country Living, Epicurious, Good Housekeeping, Martha Stewart Living, Flixster, Netflix, and Rotten Tomatoes.
The new feature will only work if the item has been pinned from the launch partner websites (with content auto-generated from those sites shown below the image on Pinterest’s site), though we can expect the list of businesses involved to expand pretty fast. Also, you’ll need to have opted in to the recently launched site redesign – if you haven’t already done so, simply click the Get it now button on top of your home feed.
The new information-rich pins will give companies a chance to build a stronger relationship with Pinterest members, and – as the additional content is offered within the site – should serve to keep users on its pages for longer, something that will of course appeal to potential advertisers should the folks behind Pinterest decide at some point to take that route in its quest to monetize the site.
