23 Mobile Things - Thing #7 - Content Saving and Sharing

I have been avoiding Pinterest because it seemed like one of the electronic holes that you can fall down and look up to realize that you have spent the last four hours on the internet and really have nothing to show for the time.  However, I know many people who absolutely love it, so I decided to give it a try.

Some things that I like:

• being able to copy pins from other people
• you can categorize your boards however you like
• you can make some of your boards private (nice for those of us who work in public service)
• nice to save visuals of some things - especially things you might want to copy

Some things I don't like:

• needing a picture to pin an article (I know, it's a visual place but some of us are text people) - I tried to pin a news article with an accompanying YouTube video, and it wouldn't let me because there was not a header photo
• linking it to my Facebook account meant that I was automatically following a whole bunch of people - many of whom I didn't want to follow and I had to go through and take them off so I didn't see their pins
• what you see when it opens seems pretty random - I did realize that it was the most recent pins from people that I was following (see point above)
• didn't find a way to group boards or subdivide boards you had already started - maybe this is there and I haven't found it yet

Some things I found quirky:

• I think almost every account that I looked at had at least one board about food and many had one on travel possibilities
• some of the items I repinned from another user seemed to only have the photo and not an accompanying link (like photo of a recipe, but no link to the actual recipe).  It don't know if this was due to the original pin or the recipe being removed from a site or something I was doing wrong.

I will probably continue to use Pinterest, but I have mixed feelings about it.  I can see the usefulness of keeping an electronic version of a clippings file for ideas on future projects.  However, it makes me feel a little like I'm e-hoarding a whole bunch of information that I may never use ... what's the point and would my time be better spent just looking for ideas when I need them? I think I will stay away from categories like "inspiring quotes", "cute animals", and "beautiful photos" as a result.  Pinterest seems to be something that I would be more successful in using for work (for example, photos of the display another library did that we could try) rather than personally.  Which is interesting - because most people (at least those profiles I looked at) looked like they were using it personally not professionally.