Pinterest is a home for organizing all of your online finds — but the platform could soon be getting even more organized for those Pins — which now number over 100 billion. During the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Monday, September 18, Pinterest CEO and Co-Founder Ben Silbermann said that a new feature called “Sections” is currently in beta testing, with a public rollout expected within the next few weeks.
The company first mentioned Pinterest Sections last week in a blog post announcing the milestone of 200 million users, but didn’t give the feature a name or a timeline. Now, according to the presentation, the feature has a name and is expected to launch in a few weeks.
Sections are Pinterest sub-boards, designed to organize larger boards to help make individual pins easier to find. For example, Silbermann says he’s using the feature to organize a recipe board into different food categories. The idea is to create more organization so that when you’re looking for dinner ideas on your food board, you don’t have to sift through all those dessert pins, too.
Pinterest users are currently limited to 500 boards — while that’s still plenty for creating separate categories on boards, the new feature creates a more hierarchical structure. After all, going from scrolling through too many Pins to scrolling through too many boards isn’t all that different.
Silbermann said that the feature has been a popular request for several years. The feature is in private beta testing, with only some users having access at present. As a beta test, the feature could change before rolling out globally to all users.
The board-within-a-board is just one of the updates Pinterest is currently developing — after reaching the 200 million user milestone, the platform says that it is working on “a slew of new features inspired by you” and that Sections is just the first. A select number of Pinners will be invited to try out the new features. The beta test of Sections comes after a minor redesign that relocated the search options and the new pinch-to-zoom feature.
Those 200 million users are active on the platform every month, marking nearly 40-percent growth since last year. More than half of users live outside the U.S. According to the company, if Pinterest were a country with a population of 200 million, it would be the seventh largest in the world.
