Oh, How Pinteresting!

Share Your Pinterest Story

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UPDATE:

Hi everyone! If you’ve been having trouble submitting your story, this is because the submission form we used is reaching its maximum limit of entries (almost 20,000!).

The response to our call-out for Pinterest stories has been incredible and overwhelming. Unfortunately, the actual amount of responses has been literally overwhelming.

We’re really sorry to have to cut off more entries so soon, but we’ll try to do another mass-mailing of Pinterest tees in the future and this week we’ll be sending out as many goodies as we have available.

Thanks SO much to all Pinners who shared and who wanted to share - we really appreciate it!

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Every day we get notes from Pinners telling us why you pin, whether it’s part of your day-to-day activities or for something special.

This week, we want to take the time to say “thanks!” to as many Pinners as we can:

If you have a Pinterest story to share with us, please fill in this form [sorry - we had to close this form because it reached the maximum number of entries!] so we’ll have the info we need to send you a Pinterest tee!

From planning a “Pinterest Party” with your friends, getting freelance gigs, building a shelf, making new friends, renovating your house, growing your business, cooking a meal, taking a trip, to stories we’ve never imagined - whatever it is, we would love to hear about it and let you know how excited we are to be a part of your story.

We’ll try to mail as many t-shirts and thank-you notes as possible this week. Thanks for pinning with us everyone!

Seeking Pinterest Translators

Guten Tag!  Olá!  Bonjour!  こんにちは!

At Pinterest, we’ve always wanted to make it easy for people all over the world to organize and share all the beautiful things they find on the web.  We want to take another step towards making this vision a reality by translating Pinterest into other languages.  

To start, we are focusing on French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish, but we hope to launch in many other languages soon including Dutch, Greek, Italian, Korean, Malay, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Swedish, and Turkish.

We would love your help.  If you speak one (or more!) of these languages and you’d be interested in helping us translate Pinterest, please share a little information with us so we can get in contact with you when we’re ready.  If you have any questions, please email us at translate@pinterest.com.

Thank you!  謝謝!  Ευχαριστώ!  Terima kasih!

Announcing Attribution and Easy Sharing with Flickr

Pins are the most useful when they link back to the original source. Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve worked with Flickr and other communities to make it easier to pin and credit content creators. Images with sharing enabled on Flickr now have a Pin It button, and pins from Flickr now have a clear attribution statement on Pinterest.

Pin It from Flickr

You can now find a Pinterest button in the Flickr share menu to easily pin everything that you can share via Flickr, including photo pages, favorites, and groups. If you pin frequently, the Pin It button will show as one of the two shortcuts directly on the photopage.

Attribution on Pins

Attribution appears below the pin’s description and provides a permanent link to the work, its author, and where they host their content. Because attribution cannot be edited, photographers can rest assured that pins and repins of their work will credit and link back to them.

We think simple and automatic attribution is a step forward for the sharing of content online, so we went even further than adding attribution to pins directly from Flickr. We will also retrieve attribution data from Flickr if a photo is pinned from a website or blog embedding a Flickr image.

Attribution is a work in progress and we’ll continue to add additional sources. In fact, today we’re also rolling out attribution for Behance, Vimeo and YouTube. We’re excited to make it easier to credit and connect with the creators of the beautiful things you discover on Pinterest. If you’d like to learn more, check out our attribution documentation. As always, we value your feedback!

Introducing Improved Group Boards

What a week! On Monday and Tuesday, we had our highest traffic days ever on Pinterest and we’ve received lots of helpful feedback and suggestions from Pinners. One popular request has been to improve group boards. Today, we’re pleased to announce we’ve made it easier to pin with others while giving you more control over your profile. We’re rolling out group board invitations and enhanced board settings.

Pinners will now be asked to join a group board before it’s added to their profile. When someone adds you to a group board, you’ll be sent an invitation to contribute. If you accept the invitation, you will be added as a collaborator and the board will appear on your profile. Invitations will be sent by email, and pending invitations will be visible to only you at the top of your profile.
 

We’ve also worked to make board settings more clear. The creator of the board is clearly labeled, and each collaborator is listed below along with the name of the pinner that invited them. Creators may remove any collaborator by clicking the “x” next to their name. Collaborators are able to remove anyone they invited, and they can also leave the group at any time. (Note: group boards created prior to this announcement will not list who invited each collaborator)

Thanks again to all of you who have given us input to help make Pinterest what it is today. Keep the feedback coming so that we can continue to make your pinning experience better and better.

Happy (group) pinning!

Interview with Chase Holfelder: Founder of Welcome Home Blog

Hi, Chase! First, can you tell us about Welcome Home Blog and how it got started?

I created Welcome Home Blog in June of 2010 as the first site in the FeelGood Blogs network.

While I don’t have any personal connection to the military, I have always thought these homecoming videos to be especially touching. After spending hours on YouTube watching video after video, and realizing that there wasn’t a centralized location on the web to view videos of this sort, I decided to create one myself. Welcome Home Blog was instantly a hit. Military families from all over the world began sending in their clips to be featured on the blog, and hundreds of appreciative emails began to pour in. 

Addressing Spam on Pinterest

As Pinterest grows, spammers have also grown within our community. While the technology we use to detect spam becomes more advanced each day, we want Pinners to know what to do in case you come across suspicious content or links while browsing Pinterest.

First: What is spam and how can you report it?

Similar to spam emails that have plagued Internet users for years, it’s possible that you’ll encounter spam while using Pinterest. In most cases, spam accounts on Pinterest create pins with misleading links and follow many people in hopes that you’ll visit their boards.

You don’t need to be concerned if a spam account follows you on Pinterest, but you should definitely feel empowered to let us know about it.

Report one or more of their pins using the Report Pin button. Just click on any pin to view it in full-size. Then, on the right-hand side of the pinned image, you’ll see the Report Pin button which will open a menu to choose your type of report.

Reporting a pin helps everyone by removing the pin from public feeds. A reported pin also gives us information about the suspicious account and the spam links they’re trying to promote.

Second: How can you protect your account?

There are many online spam tactics, but following general Internet-safety practices will go a long way:

• If you click on a link and the resulting page isn’t what you expect, return to Pinterest.com.
• Don’t click on a pin that promotes a free giveaway or looks like an advertisement. Pinterest doesn’t have any advertising and we don’t post surveys, giveaways, or other promotions. If an offer seems too good to be true, it’s very likely spam.
• Pinterest will only ask for your login and password details on Pinterest.com or on our official iPhone app. Don’t log in on other websites or on other apps.
• Pinterest.com is the only Pinterest website; other addresses containing the name “Pinterest” are not legitimate.
• Avoid interacting with accounts where their pins do not link to relevant content or their pins all link to the same source.
• You should choose unique, difficult-to-guess passwords for all of your online accounts, and you should update them regularly. Don’t reuse passwords across websites. If you’re ever concerned about your account, create a new password.

Fighting spam is a top priority as we continue to grow and we really appreciate the reports we’ve received so far. Your input and efforts have really helped us develop our anti-spam features, so if you have any questions or concerns, you can learn more and contact us at http://support.pinterest.com.

Thanks for pinning with us!

Vimeo Pinning

Caine’s Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

The Pin It bookmarklet can now pin Vimeo videos in addition to YouTube! 

Pinning from Vimeo works the same way that pinning from YouTube does, so if you haven’t already, install the Pin It bookmarklet to your browser’s bookmarks bar following the directions here.

Then you can pin from Vimeo.com and from pages that have embedded Vimeo videos. 

Or, just browse and watch some pinned videos by going to the Video feed.

Have fun pinning and if you’re looking for a great video, we recommend Caine’s Arcade: This short film about a DIY cardboard arcade constructed by 9 year-old Caine is guaranteed to make your day better!

Caine’s Arcade is directed by Nirvan Mullick and produced by Interconnectd.

Introducing Board Covers

A couple weeks ago we launched our new design for Pinterest profiles and we got a lot of great suggestions from Pinners.

One of the most requested features was the ability to choose a pin to be the cover for each board. Today, you’ll be able to do just that:

If you’d prefer a specific pin as a board cover, mouse-over the board you want to edit and click “Edit Board Cover”. Next, select a cover pin and drag it to the exact position you want.

When you’re finished, hit “Set Cover”.

You can also choose a board cover while you’re browsing within your board: Just mouse-over any of your pins to select it. 

Covers on collaborative boards can only be selected by the Pinner who created the board. Other than that, you can choose new covers as often as you’d like, so we hope you’ll have fun customizing the look of your boards and profile.

As always, we consider this new feature a work-in-progress and we really appreciate all the feedback we received about it along the way. Let us know your continued thoughts and Happy Pinning!

From Pinterest Co-Founder, Paul Sciarra

I consider myself an incredibly lucky guy. For the last three and a
half years, I have had the privilege of helping to found the company
that — after fits and starts and lots of awkward half-steps — has
become Pinterest.

Following a failed first product, Ben, Evan, and I started work on
Pinterest with a simple idea: make an internet service where people
can create and share collections of images — an online take on the
time-honored tradition of collecting your favorite things in
photo-albums, on refrigerators, in dog-eared stacks of clippings, or,
of course, on physical cork-boards.

Although it’s hard to imagine today, I lost sleep when we launched the
first version in early 2010 over whether anyone except a handful of
close family and guilt-ridden friends would ever use it.  Now,
millions of people from all over the world use Pinterest, and it’s on
a trajectory to make pinners of so many more!

The Pinterest journey has often been strange, but always exciting. I’ve
played lots of roles along the way: from product-guy to recruiter;
from fundraiser to construction foreman. I even made a humbling run as
a self-taught developer which produced plenty of code I hope never
sees the light of day.

From marking milestones in hundreds of new pins to millions, the
company has grown, the product has evolved, and I’ve changed too along
the way. After lots of reflection and plenty of discussion with Ben
and others, I’ve decided that now is a good time for me to step down
formally from day-to-day involvement. Of course, I’ll continue to be
there for the company:  now, as an advisor, an owner, and — as always — a
dedicated pinner.

Looking back over the past few years, what strikes me most is the
passion of the folks that use Pinterest. Few companies get
love-letters from their users, and few get hugs from users at meetups.
I can almost guarantee that this is the only company ever that’s
been offered homemade barbeque sauce in exchange for a beta
invitation.

This passion reflects, I think, something that we’ve always believed
as a company.  That is, that the best internet services aren’t just
ways for people to escape their everyday lives. Instead, those
services with longevity –- with real “legs” –- enhance folks’
day-to-day experiences, deepen their relationships, and show them
things about themselves they didn’t know before.

As for me, I’ve accepted a role as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at
Andreessen Horowitz.  I hope that eventually leads me back to doing
what I’ve done for the past three and a half years — namely, building
cool things with awesome people with unexpected results.

I’m grateful to be a part of this enormously talented group of people,
and I’m so excited for what’s to come!

- Paul

Updated Pinterest Terms

Our original Terms stated that by posting content to Pinterest you grant Pinterest the right for us to sell your content. Selling content was never our intention and we removed this from our updated Terms.

We updated our Acceptable Use Policy and we will not allow pins that explicitly encourage self-harm or self-abuse.

We released simpler tools for anyone to report alleged copyright or trademark infringements.

Finally, we added language that will pave the way for new features such as a Pinterest API and Private Pinboards.

We think these changes are important and we encourage you to review the new documents here. These Terms will go into effect for all users on April 6, 2012.

Like everything at Pinterest, these updates are a work in progress that we will continue to improve upon. We’re working hard to make Pinterest the best place for you to find inspiration from people who share your interests. We’ve gotten a lot of help from our community as we’ve crafted these Terms.

Thanks!

Ben & the Pinterest Team