Pinterest Profile

This article was written by Phin Upham

Pinterest is a fairly new social application that uses a system of “pins” to help identify what’s cool. It’s a similar concept to social bookmarking, but you can pin just about anything you want. Users can follow boards created by other users, which are like small hubs for discussions or ideas based on the pin.

The site was launched to an invitation-only beta in March of 2010, after a yearlong development cycle.

Ben Silberman, the founder of Pinterest, was excited to launch his creation and wanted a personal touch. Reports say that Silberman actually gave out his personal information to his first 5,000 users and tried to make contact with them whenever he could. The company launched an iPhone app in 2011, which quickly rose to the top of the Apple App Store.

By the end of 2011, Time had called Pinterest one of the top 50 websites in 2011. By December of that year, it had already amassed enough users to be called one of the top ten social networks.

The company has made a number of improvements to try and hold the attention of its users. It developed more robust profile pages, and gave users the right to sell their content through Pinterest.

The Pinterest website is encoded in the programming language Django, and its back end is powered by Python. Pinterest also incorporates a meta tag that allows users to keep their images from being pinned on Pinterest, a move geared toward dealing with copyright disputes in the company.