Pinterest is one of those wildly popular websites we find ourselves explaining to people. Most people think it’s for women only so we thought we’d have our token male, John, look at the site and report back. John will delve deeper and deeper into Pinterest in an attempt to explain it to everyone but in particular a certain half of the population. To continue from last week’s introduction, Breaking Even Communications takes a look at social media through a guy’s perspective in this blog series. Let’s see what happens once John remembers his neglected Pinterest account:
When we last left off, I had started, and then quickly forgot about, my Pinterest page. And thus, I now believe Pinterest is like a potted plant. Some people like their plant, paying it attention, giving it light and water and love. Others, like me, will bring a plant home from the, I dunno, plant store(?), only to forget I left it on the radiator to die an agonizing plant-death.
But, like that birdsnest snake plant I had in college, you can bring a withered and dehydrated Pinterest page back from the brink with a little bit of half-hearted attention.
Rather than pin about guitars that I don’t have time to play and cars I can’t afford, I decided to shift my Pins to one of my more recent obsessions—making the perfect chicken wing. (Why are chicken wings second only to calzones as being the most magical food found on earth? Dude, you’ll never understand if I need to tell you.)
And, as it turns out, Pinterest is made for recipe sharing.
Here’s what a simple keyword search for wings pulled up:
My God, man. Just look at that. That’s beautiful. And, unlike guitars and Mustangs that were the focus on my other Pinterest pages, I do have a budget for the occasional wing-fest.
Moreover, Pinterest now has a fun, practical purpose for me. I’ve got about 50,000 wing recipes and ideas accessible in a colorful, fun format.
Which brings us back to the primitive days of personal computing. If you remember when the IBM PC Jr. came out, it was marketed as more or less a word cruncher/videogame system. It was also touted as a way to organize your recipes, via the simple process of turning on the computer, waiting a half hour to boot up, removing your old hand-written recipe cards from the box, typing them, storing them on a large floppy drive, printing them on a noisy dot matrix printer, and then putting them in a binder. It was that simple!
Well, the digital world has come a long way to become the kitten-gif delivery system that it’s famous for today. But we’re still using it to organize ways to cram our maws full of fatty, fried foods.
Next week, check out John’s first pin and an IRL Pinterest recipe…will it be an internet-worthy Pinterest fail?