Tuesday, July 03, 2012

Is this a good thing? or the downfall of pinterest?

There has bee a lot of grumblings against Pinterest, concerns over copyright and attribution, etc. And I understand where people are coming from, whether or not I agree with them.

Well, apparently Pinterest has heard and is now making some changes.

But I have to wonder about the changes.

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"The peace offering includes having the business’ price banner appears and remain on the photo, even if the repinner has deleted the price from the description." (source)

I pin a lot of stuff from Etsy. I often purposefully remove the price so that the corner banner with the price is not on the photo.  To me it looks spammy. It's cluttered and commercial. I don't want clutter or commercial on my boards - just pretty things.

This may benefit businesses (although that remains to be seen) but it seems like it's tying the hands of the user. BAH!

And at first blush, I don't like it.

Not only that, but the article states that the new practice is going to be applied RETRO-actively. Meaning pins done in the past will all of a sudden now carry the attributions according to the new policy. hmmmmmmm.

UPDATE: (emphasis mine)
Pinterest has made a move to help the virtual pinboard site become more than a destination for browsing beautiful photos.
The company has added permanent links on pins that originate from the craft site Etsy, the crowd-funding site Kickstarter and several others. The idea is a good one for pinners who won't have to scour the Internet to find more information, and it's also good for the sites that have "pinnable" content. (source)


I guess my concern is that it's going to turn into a shopping mall. And who needs another one of those?

What do you all think? 

Is this a good thing or is it going to ruin Pinterest?