I love the internet. Seriously, I do. There are so many time-sucks out there, but I justify it by telling myself that they’re inspirational time-sucks. All this web-surfing is showing me new ideas, making me more creative, blah blah blah…..

I already lose hours upon hours of my life to StumbleUpon. Well, between my stumbles and surfing other blogs, I kept coming across this site called Pinterest. Then I saw a couple mentions of it on Facebook. And me being me, and always looking for things that are interesting, I decided to scope it out.

You actually have to request an invite, then wait to be approved. Not sure why this is. It’s a fairly new site, so maybe they’re trying to keep it from growing faster than they can keep up with? I saw someone on another blog mention that it took a few days for her to get her confirmation email, but I got mine within a few hours. Here’s how Pinterest describes itself:

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes. Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Basically, it’s a visual pinboard, or a collection of your favorite images from all over the web, all linking back to their original sources. Pretty cool, and it sure beats having a mile long list in your bookmarks folder, or having a thousand images saved in a folder in your desktop with absolutely no idea where you found them. If you don’t want to take my word for it, Time Magazine included it on it’s list of The 50 Best Website of 2011.

If you connect through Facebook, Pinterest automatically finds all of your Facebook friends on Pinterest, and asks if you want to follow them. You can browse through your friends pins, or ALL recent pins. You can browse by tag (wedding dresses, chocolate chip cookies, etc), or by general topic (design, recipes, fashion, etc). You can be as general or as specific as you choose.

Let’s say you’re looking for recipes, and find one you like. You look at that person’s recipes board, and see tons of other recipes you like. Then you see that they have a fashion folder, and you look at that. You like everything in there too. You might decide that you have very similar tastes, and decide to follow that person, so that everything they pin shows up in your feed. Or, you can be a little more selective and decide to follow only some of their boards. Because just because you like to eat the same things doesn’t necessarily mean you have the same taste in home decor. I’ve started following a couple random people, and I have some random people following me. I’ve discovered some pretty cool stuff through them.

It’s VERY easy to pin things. If you’re on Firefox (which you should be) it’s as easy as dragging the “pin it” button to your bookmark toolbar. Then, if you’re surfing the web as something catches your interest, you just click on the “pin it” button. A list of all that pages images will pop up, and you simply click on the one you want to pin, and choose what category Pinboard you want it to go in. Couldn’t be simpler.

There are all kinds of ways you might use the site. I tend to be a bit of an image collector anyways, and I love just scrolling though picture that give me inspiration. I collect color pallets, design work, DIY projects, photography, illustrations, typography, and all sorts of other goodies. Before I discovered Pinterest I was using Evernote to keep track of my inspiration images, but this is even better. Evernote is great for keeping track of lists, articles and other written things, but Pinterest is great because it shows you ALL of your images together on one screen. For me, being able to take it all in at once is very satisfying.

Interestingly enough, I just checked their blog, and they’re releasing an update to their mobile site today. This is awesome, because I do a ton of web surfing on my phone. This *might* be why my battery in constantly dying….

So…there you go. Just another thing I love that I wanted to share. Happy Pinning!