I am not so sure that I understand the purpose behind Pinterest.  First of all, they seem to make it a somewhat exclusive club by not allowing you to automatically sign-up.  You either apply and wait or you beg for an invite from a friend who already has a Pinterest account. This seems like forced viral marketing…but for what reason?

I applied and got an auto email thanking me for joining the Pinterest waiting list.  Wait…what?  I have to wait to join?  Why? A you really checking up on me? Do you need to see my credentials? After venting my frustration at being wait-listed, I did have a couple of big-hearted pals who took pity on me and sent me an invite to speed up the process:

Four days later, I was finally got the “approval letter” from Pinterest directly, but by then I was already in.  By the way, drop me a line if you want a personal invite to check it out for yourself. I can’t seem to find any online resource about why they choose this process for inclusion, but I did find a lot of people asking the same question as me.  However, the process isn’t slowing down their use rate.  According to Alexa, Pinterest pageviews have increased 128% over the last three months, even though it has been around since March 2010. And according to their Wiki page, the company was valued at $200 million in Oct 2011. What am I missing?

To be fair, Pinterest has never claimed to be a game changer. Their stated mission statement is “to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting. We think that a favorite book, toy, or recipe can reveal a common link between two people.” But other than being able to post pictures, what’s the appeal?  I can see how this would be great for visual designers, photographers, interior designers, etc. to strut their stuff. But what about the rest of us? Just to see how it works, I created a board focused on the Imminent Zombiepocalypse. Last week I started adding images to it and since then, it has had hundreds of “likes’ and “repins” and new “followers”, but so what? I didn’t post anything that wasn’t already online or anything original, so who cares? I am not a renowned zombieologist, I’m just a guy who thinks zombies are fun. I contribute nothing original. How does the fact that Jenna or Kyle or JumaniXL repinned one of the images from my board help to “connect everyone”?

Do you see any business or personal value in using it? Is it just another online time waster? Is it just for fun? That’s cool with me, ’cause I know those are really popular. But somebody just tell me that so that I can let it go and move on and maybe try Tumblr next. Fact is, I have only a small bit of time for fun these days, and I don’t care to spend it looking at pictures of couches, but that’s just me.  But don’t worry – become a faithful follower and I’ll keep posting those awesome zombie pics!