Pinterest needs some work
My wife convinced me to try out Pinterest. It is basically a normal bookmarking site that shows a thumbnail from the bookmarked site (not to be confused with a thumbnail of the bookmarked site). The thing that makes it so popular is that it is geared towards the kind of stuff you’d find in Martha Stewart Living, and the terminology/interface is geared towards non-techies.
And that is the problem. In addition to being geared towards non-techies, it also feels like it was made by non-techies. I’ve been using it for a few days and like it, but would love it if they’d fix a few things:
- Don’t force me to follow people I don’t know when I sign up. The signup process needs some work. I can understand suggesting that you follow some people, but forcing you to follow strangers wasn’t something I wanted to do.
- Give an option to hide duplicate items when browsing Pinterest. I hate it when something popular is posted and reposted and reposted, so all you see is the same stuff over and over and over.
- Create native extensions for Chrome and Firefox. The bookmarklet doesn’t work consistently. It doesn’t work at all on some of my browsers. Right now I’m using a third-party extension that lets me right click the image I want to pin. This works maybe 90% of the time, but I’d love to use an official extension.
- When I’m done editing or deleting a board, redirect me to my original page. This one drives me crazy. I go to my list of boards, I delete one, and somehow I end up at the homepage. Why in the world would they think I want to go to the homepage? I’m obviously interested in modifying my boards, so why not put me back where I was before I edited/deleted a board?
- Add an optional profanity filter. I suspect a huge number of their users are family-oriented or very religious. It would be awesome if I didn’t have to see the profanity put up by what I suspect is a very small minority. This is especially important when repinning from a board that has profanity in its name.
There are other minor annoyances, but those are the big ones (particularly #2).
Overall though I’ve enjoyed it. I’m currently using two boards. One is for DIY stuff I want to try, and the other is for recipes I want to try. It is much easier to find a recipe on a wall of pictures than a list of page titles.