Mark Lyn­der­say

If Live­jour­nal and Blog­ger ush­ered in the Read-Write Web, then the dom­i­nat­ing in­flu­ence of Face­book has led to the "aw gee" Web, an or­gy of shar­ing and lik­ing of com­ments, im­ages and Web links that threat­ens to bury old school pro­to­cols like FTP and e-mail in a surge of up­lift­ed thumbs. Don't in­ter­pret that as a blan­ket dis­missal of con­tent cu­rat­ed by a mass au­di­ence. I've liked a thing or two my­self us­ing Face­book's ubiq­ui­tous graph­ic of a thumbs up and, frankly, sought such ap­prov­ing pass-alongs for my con­tent with all the re­serve and deco­rum of a street­walk­er. Face­book leads at this game, not least be­cause it large­ly in­vent­ed it, but there's a new play­er draw­ing a lot of in­ter­est, or rather, more ac­cu­rate­ly, Pin­ter­est. The new ser­vice, avail­able as an op­tion with­in Face­book, where I found it and on­line as a more ful­ly fea­tured prod­uct, is soon to be rolled out as a com­pan­ion iPad app.

If you get an in­vite, then you cre­ate boards, pages on­to which you col­lect themed pins. As a sim­ple and still some­what be­fud­dled pin­ner, I've got just one board with four pins, each for themes I find in­ter­est­ing and worth ref­er­enc­ing, such as pho­tog­ra­phy and movies. You then down­load a book­marklet, a tiny bit of code that shows up in the book­marks bar of your brows­er as a link that you click when you're on a page with con­tent you want to keep and share. In some ways, Pin­ter­est is a bit like Twit­ter, a more ful­ly formed and fo­cused ver­sion of a pop­u­lar Face­book fea­ture re­fined for an au­di­ence that wants to do just that with­out be­ing dis­tract­ed by any­thing else. If Twit­ter turned Face­book's once turgid sta­tus up­dates in­to a fast mov­ing stream of snip­py com­ments and trun­cat­ed links, Pin­ter­est turns "liked" con­tent in­to, well, a scrap­book. It's no sur­prise then that the ser­vice has proven wild­ly pop­u­lar with fe­male users and the streams of Pin­ter­est are rich with fash­ion­able items and home in­te­ri­ors. Of the first 12 peo­ple to fol­low my mea­gre pins, all but one is fe­male. The del­i­cate pas­tel hues of the Pin­ter­est site and the well, girly con­tent, have led to at least one bit of amus­ing back­lash. The Man­ter­est­ing site (http://man­ter­est­ing.com/) trav­els the same course, but is all gun­metal grays wood­work­ing and hand­guns. Con­tent is nailed, not pinned.

The biggest Pin­ter­est back­lash though, has come from the pho­tog­ra­phers and copy­right hold­ers of all the con­tent that's be­ing pinned so ex­u­ber­ant­ly. Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Kirsten Kowal­s­ki wrote an elo­quent ex­pla­na­tion of why she tore down her pin­boards on her blog (http://ow.ly/9Fg1N) and Seli­na Maitreya, a ca­reer con­sul­tant to pho­tog­ra­phers re­cent­ly can­celled a planned Pin­ter­est project. Pin­ter­est, as part of its terms of ser­vice (TOS), force­ful­ly shoves re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for copy­right clear­ance for pinned con­tent back to its users. If you pin some­thing and the own­er of the con­tent ob­jects and sues, the com­pa­ny has al­ready de­clared that it isn't re­spon­si­ble, you pay to de­fend your­self and Pin­ter­est. Si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly, the TOS grants Pin­ter­est a li­cense to any work you do pin which you hap­pen to own or con­trol. A new com­ment­ing fea­ture might put some dis­tance be­tween Pin­ter­est and law­suits, turn­ing pins in­to com­ment­ed posts, but the TOS seems to be man­i­fest­ly un­fair at its core. The legalese al­so seems iffy, seek­ing as it does to have its cake and to eat it and re­mains untest­ed in a court of law, but the terms seem to con­trast quite sharply with the home­ly, wel­com­ing feel of the site and users should ex­er­cise ap­pro­pri­ate cau­tion.