I have a new addiction and it is called Pinterest. I can spend hours on Pinterest just exploring and discovering new and exciting things and pinning them to my virtual pinboard.
You may be asking what is Pinterest? Pinterest is an invitation-only online pinboard that lets users find, save, organize and share the things they love on the web all in one place. So lets say I just bought a house and am looking for decorating ideas, instead of going to hardware stores and looking at paint chips, furniture catalogs for couch ideas or accent stores for the finishing touches, I can look at all of the stores online and pin photos and ideas all to one centralized board. I can even look through the community pins to see what others have found.
Pinterest touches on a couple of interesting trends. First, the switch from search to discovery. As Tech Crunch puts it , sites such as Pinterest "allow for self-expression, and in doing so, re-sort and re-shape the web we see, and that is a very big shift away from traditional search toward social discovery." Second, the niching of social media. Since the audience on Pinterest is nearly 70% female and mostly under the age of 45, according to Search Engine Watch, if you fit in those demographics you will likely find a lot of information that is appealing to you. I think we will see a lot of new social sites popping up in the near future that appeal to niche audiences.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go discover new ideas for my guest bedroom.