What Is Pinterest?

The Internet is helpful with a lot of different things. It offers a wealth of information, available through a simple series of keystrokes. You can find out about virtually any event in history. Maybe you'd like to know the score from the 1946 World Series? Or find a really great recipe for baking a brie? In just about any case, the Internet can help you find what you're looking for.

Lately there have been some wonderful services available online. Many of these take the form of Internet applicationsweb apps for shortthat help you with everything from social networking to doing your taxes to listening to music. One particularly fun and useful app I'd like to introduce you to is Pinterest. Pinterest is a web app that serves as a sort of online scrapbook. When you sign up for your free account, you can save links to interesting images and articles on Pinterest's virtual corkboard. Just like a real corkboard, you can pin images to Pinterest and save them for later. If you want, you can connect your account with your social media accountsFacebook and Twitterso that you can show your friends what you're posting to Pinterest.

What I like about Pinterest is that is saves your ideas in one place, and uses boardsto help you organize your images, or pins. Here is a screenshot of some of my boards:

So you can create a board for just about any topic you would like. A lot of my friends create boards like these: Places to Visit, Recipes to Try, or Craft Projects. You can pin images from just about any site you visit on the web, or you can scan through the most recent and most popular pins being saved from all over the world.

You can search Pinterest for the latest posts in more than two dozen categories, ranging from Cars & Motorcycles to Food & Drink and Design. There's something for just about everyone. The Pinterest site is constantly growing and refreshing because people are adding to it all of the time. Here is a screenshot of what was at the top of Pinterest's popular feed at the time of this blog post:

When you pin an image to Pinterest from an external website, the app not only saves the image but the link associated with it. For example, if you pin a casserole recipe, the image is what you first see on your Pinterest page. But if you click the image, you'll activate the link and be brought back to it. So if you're interested in cooking, and search the web for recipes, you could save them all in your Pinterest account, and sort them by image. It would be just like having your own virtual cookbook, which you can easily add to every day. Below is an example of a lemon cookie recipe I'm excited to try. You can see the source link, www.frugalanticsrecipes.com, at the bottom. To visit the site, you can either click the link or click the image and you'll be taken right there. Isn't that just really cool?

Sometimes the amount of information and ideas online is just overwhelming. Websites like Pinterest can help you keep track of what you're working on, and keep you up to date on the latest trends. They even have a blog about all the cool things people are doing with Pinterest. Why not give it a whirl and let us know what you think?

UPDATE: Folks have been asking us some great questions about Pinterest. It's a free service with its own website. If you are interested in learning more, visit http://about.pinterest.com/basics/ for a more in-depth introduction. We love your questions, so keep them coming!