Posts tagged Facebook

Pinterest – located at pinterest.com – is a social photo-sharing website. Users can establish accounts, and then set up collections of images that reflect their interest. 

Other users can browse their collections, ‘like’ various items, collect images from each other, and establish mutual interest relationships and so on. 

Launching as a closed beta in March 2010, the site has in stages opened up to the public, and has generated a lot of enthusiasm in the process.

On August 16, 2011, Time magazine published Pinterest in its “50 Best Websites of 2011” column.(Wikipedia)

Just in the last few months – December, January – the site has been skyrocketing with users. It crossed the 10 million user mark last month, being one of the fastest sites to do so.

Users love it’s visuality, ease of use, and it’s ability to facilitate relationships with others of similar interests. It links in with Facebook, Twitter,  has an RSS feed feature, comes with WordPress widgets and there’s an iPhone app for it too!

But recently, awareness has been growing of downsides for users of the site. In particular related to the very use of images that is such a big part of its appeal. 

I literally only heard of this site about a week ago.

A few days ago, I retweeted this tweet about it:

56 Ways to Market Your Business on #Pinterestj.mp/yt2cO8 via @copyblogger RT @brasonja #in

And that tweet of mine was RT’d about 4 times, more than almost any other of my tweets. Clearly it is a topic of interest right now! So as I began to read today more concerns about the site, I thought I’d pull together this blog post about it all.

Here is a clearer link to that article on CopyBlogger. 

It talks about a wide spectrum of ways to use Pinterest for marketing your business, everything from social media immersion techniques to branding to traffic analysis techniques to webinar support. Seems all very exciting and wonderful, but read on, please!

Another Pinterest-excitement tweet I saw recently:

How the medical industry is using (and could use): Pinterest bit.ly/zaonKE RT @MelissaOnline

This MedCityNews article showcases how the medical industry already uses and could even more use Pinterest to boost patient morale, improve patient education and, of course, engage in cutting-edge marketing activities. 

This page also mentions the revenue stream aspect of Pinterest, which involves affiliate marketing via Skimlinks and changing the codes linked to images to replace the original marketer with Pinterest . That practice, described further in this MarketingLand article is generating interest and concern as more people become aware of it. 

But copyright theft is a much more serious concern, since it involves legal ramifications that are completely beyond what users have in mind when they sign up to use Pinterest. This BusinessInsider describes those concerns. 

In a question and answer format, the piece explores the idea that Pinterest may be more illegal than Napster was, due to its use of images not owned by the user, thereby violating the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act). Pinterest actually ‘requires’ that each user ‘own’ rights to the images they post, but they in no way reinforce that requirement. 

This article explores the fair use argument and how it applies to Pinterest (and Tumblr, for that matter), and also mentions that Pinterest grabs whole sites when people ‘pin’ an image from that site, making it all even more serious.

Pinterest makes users even more uncomfortable in its statement that it reserves the right to sell any image posted by a user. This article by RWW mentions that several businesses, after initially signing up to use Pinterest, almost immediately closed their accounts as they more fully explored the implications.  What it boils down to is that, if a user posts a photo which they don’t own the license to (a license given them free, world-wide, very broad and open rights to), they could be sued for posting it (and thereby granting Pinterest the right to sell it). 

All in all, seems like a lot going on that hasn’t fully been worked through yet.. both for Pinterest, and even perhaps for Tumblr!

Here’s a post on Storify for any of you who’ve heard about it and not tried it yet. It’s written by a woman who’s evaluating it for use within the practice of Journalism, seems like a great site for all sorts of additional purposes too!

http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2011/03/02/11-6-hours-survey-scam-spreads-like-wildfire-on-twitter/

This article is from the security firm sophos, and contains great info on how to detect and avoid this scam, and what to do if you were already caught. Also generally the newest thinking on safety online, given the prevalance of this sort of thing.

Take care out there!

 http://ow.ly/45fBa

From TNW:

“Facebook is resuming the release of its feature for applications to request personal information such as phone number and home address.

This is the second time it has rolled this out, pulling it back a few days after it was launched in January amid congressional security concerns.  …”

Click link for more..

An interesting article on how the machinations of newsfead content work, and what it means both for companies & organizations on Facebook, and regular people.

It’s all always changing so much!!

http://ow.ly/3Gn6O

http://www.businessinsider.com/10-things-you-need-to-know-this-morning-2011-1-20?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+typepad/alleyinsider/silicon_alley_insider+(Silicon+Alley+Insider)

Newest News on Media (and a guy running through 5 train cars!)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1348178/Facebook-suspends-developer-access-users-phone-numbers-addresses.html#ixzz1BSo6FucO

It’s the flip-side of enjoying instant communication with your friends.

Facebook has courted a fresh privacy row after allowing developers of apps access to sensitive information including telephone numbers and addresses.

The social networking site announced the change on its blog last Friday, saying: ‘We are now making a user’s address and mobile phone number accessible.’

Internet security analysts and privacy experts immediately advised people to remove their phone numbers and addresses from the site.