Can someone put a Pin in it please?

I’ve been back and forth about whether to add to the hype surrounding Pinterest.com. It may well be a very useful, fun and engaging addition to social networking, it’s just, well, I can’t really be bothered with it.

The site has been around for a couple of years but has shot into the limelight recently thanks to a few high profile blog posts and news articles about the Tumblr-like social network.

There are lots of articles that have detailed exactly how to use Pinterest, and what the benefits of using the site are – it’s all fairly reminiscent of the hype around Quora last year, and hopefully it will be given time to grow and develop.

I can see the attraction of Pinterest; it’s a more accessible, social way of creating mood boards for example, or collaborating with someone to draw up a wish list (i.e. a bride and groom-to-be, pulling together a wedding gift list).

For brands too, it can be great for collating product ranges in one place to showcase to customers and, on the face of it, I can quite easily see the rationale behind the site.

Images are a proven means of increasing engagement. A recent Facebook study for example, found that links which included a thumbnail image in the link preview received 65% more “likes” and 50% more comments than those without images.

I’m struggling, however, to see how quick and easy it will be to keep updated – a characteristic that perhaps Pinterest needs to become widely popular. Perhaps I can’t get into it because it’s not aimed at me, having primarily been adopted as the social platform for women.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s important for people to explore new ways to interact online, but I think there is a risk, especially in the case of Pinterest, that people will dive in, have a quick look and dive out again, claiming to have ‘tried it and it’s not for me’. This can be seen in the latest stats from comScore, in which Pinterest actually lost users in the UK in January.

I’d also perhaps be more inclined to explore Pinterest further, if there wasn’t such an explosion of ‘Pin’ related terms that seem to be shouting at me from all corners of the web.

Currently you can pin a picture to your Pinterest pin board and then use PinPuff to measure your Pinfluence. There’s also something called PinClout which, it seems, does much the same thing (of which, I’m not entirely sure).

As an aside, I think influence measuring tools should be offering more to their users, perhaps taking a similar route to PeerIndex who recently announced PeerPerks, a new service that offers freebies and discounts to key brand influencers.

As for Pinterest, I’ll keep an eye on its progress. But later – my head’s spinning – I feel I’m in need of a lie down… and a Pint.