Pinterest

In our technology class, each of us were given a website devoted to organizing an aspect of our "online life".  The categories, broadly speaking, were bookmarking tools, note taking tools and curation tools.  We are presenting a 20-minute synopsis of the tool to small groups soon in class.  As an outside project, we were asked to reflect here about the process.  My website: Pinterest.  Pinterest is a website generally devoted sharing ideas and thoughts with other people.  Essentially, it allows you to "pin" photos and websites to a virtual corkboard and share these thoughts with other people.

In general, I like the idea.  Sharing recipes or directions for science activities would be a fantastic use of this website.  Additionally, if you really want to find photos of classic "mad scientists", you're likely to find legions.  Unfortunately, like many other social networking sites, I will have a hard time diving in.  The process of simplifying the website for my colleagues has been frustrating, to say the least...but it has also been instructive.  This blog posts is likely to come across as a bit complaining...fair warning.

My first issues with the site came when signing up.  It allows you to immediately link your account to Facebook (convenient, I will agree) or you can create it with an e-mail.  A personal pet peeve is when it requires information like gender.  While signing up, you must specify "male" or "female".  Though you can change this later to "unspecified", the program still has this information.  The cynic in me says they will target market based on this.

Once you sign up, it takes you through the navigation tour.  Albeit possibly useful, I don't generally like these tours and would much rather figure it out on my own later.  Nowhere could I find a way to skip the tour.  There is no option to just click out of it.  Additionally, at the end of the "tour", it invites you to "follow" some "recommended pages".  Specifically, it invites you to follow five.  More specifically, you CANNOT advance through the tour without following five.  About 20 minutes later, I did finally figure out how to "unfollow" these boards...but again, Pinterest now has those initial selections.

Your profile is automatically set to be searchable by web engines, though you can change this through settings.  Also, you automatically are set to receive e-mail updates from every possible update...but again, you can opt out.  I think my biggest worry here applies to almost every other website...as a consumer, I would rather "Opt In" (default is opted out) than have to "Opt Out" of things I don't even know about.

Although I am unlikely to use Pinterest and all of my frustrations aside, I do potentially see the utility of it.  As I mentioned above, it's a great resource for curating information and ideas to one place.  It allows for large amounts of related information to be gathered together in one place and it gives people a space to create content and share it with the world.