Pinterest

Pinterest is a massively popular social media network which is highly visual and allows users to create custom boards with topics you are interested in following along. I was interested in how well suited the content could be customized to my male perspective as this platform is most popular among women. So I have signed up for an account and just attempted to customize my board with around twenty topics added to my Home feed. Nothing remotely exclusively feminine at all was chosen, though I did choose Men's Fashion and perhaps that's why it returned Women's Fashion as well. Which had me 'Undo' the board and try again. When I clicked 'Undo' and the top of my Home page it did not seem to give me the same topic selection lightbox pop-up. I looked through my settings to see how to edit my Home feed topics but did not find it. So I Googled how to change your Pinterest Home feed and learned it's by following and pinning items that your Home feed should fill up. Next, I pinned to digital painting tutorials to a new board called 'Digital Painting Tutorials'. When I returned to the Home page it didn't appear anything had been updated yet. I am going to pin several more items and follow some people to try again now. I pinned about six more items and followed about four boards and now my Home page is about half full of digital painting tutorial content which is amazing I am excited for this because I am so passionate about digital art and didn't know how much awesome related content was available here. I will be back most days now because there are so many ways to learn and am grateful for it. I like that the site loads quickly between pages that's always nice. I also really like how you can add their tabbed suggestions at the top which were spot on. For example, I searched for 'Digital Painting' and it retrieved some great general content but the tabs at the top were highly targeted including 'step by step', 'photoshop', 'lighting', 'shadows' and so on which is outstanding. I like the search functionality here better than on DeviantArt actually. This is the first I've seen of the 'Custom' gender setting in addition to Male and Female so that's interesting and I respect it. Pinterest integrates with Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, Google+, Facebook and Twitter so that's cool. And I see that you can integrate apps quite easily as well. I am assuming similar to a Facebook app I've setup in the past on my website and had to login to authorize it. Good to know.

It's a free platform with awesome content so that's tough to complain about anything but in that the user interface is so minimalist it takes doing a few circles so to speak while exploring how everything works. This is fine because it's what makes Pinterest unique and it's so visual which is great. Now that I've seen my Home page populate with amazingly targeted, helpful content I can use to facilitate my creativity and education I am onboard and happy to have just spent this hour becoming familiar with everything.

If you believe Pinterest is just for women now I know that's a misconception. It may have a large female user base but there seems to be more comprehensive content for my interest in digital painting at least compared to Instagram or StumbleUpon which are both very good. But for this topic at least I like it better. And there is a lot of male orientated topics and content to follow as well. I didn't 'Sports' among the Home feed selections but perhaps I didn't scroll down enough. But there certainly was just about everything else I wanted to know about like cool cars, men's suits and a lot of good general topics like healthy eating and much more. If you're just web surfing but especially if you have a passion you want to learn more about check out Pinterest for sure.