A twitter friend sent me an invite to Pinterest, as I’m interested in what it does. However, do far, all it has done is annoy me!
Clicking the link from the email, the first thing it offered was the ability to sign in with Facebook or Twitter. There was no alternative way of creating an account. This is a personal issue of mine, I don’t want to have things connected by default, I want the choice. I know for many, having this option makes it easy; for the company it also reduces spam and provides a in-built platform for spreading the message about the product, but I beleive the alternative should be offered.
I decided to use Facebook, as that was the site that was promoted the strongest, with messages that it won’t do anything with your account. Click once, click twice and it tells you what it’s going to do with the account – add posts and access when you’re not logged in. Facebook now allows you to deny permission, so too no’s and it lets me skip this stage. To a account creation page asking for username, email and password. So the option is there, just not shown on sign up screen.
The next screen it asked me what I was interested in; a few clicks, a few choices made; my thougth at this point was that it would provide me some options to follow, or a general stream of content around those images. No, instead it automatically follows a number of people I have never heard of. Multiple unfollows later, I’m left with a blank page, ready to do things with.
But remember I got an invite from someone. One thing it has not done is provided me a way to follow that person. Back to the original email, find their account names, click through, click follow.
So 4 things:
- Not providing me an alternative to a SNS sign up
- When I refused to play sharing game, then making do an alternative sign up
- Auto-Following people I have never heard of
- making it hard to follow the person who shared the product with me
My final issue is actually with the whole premise of the product. It’s all about making scrapbooks of images you like on the internet and sharing them, a visual list of book marks. But it appears to have no regard for copyright at all, eg it allows you to repost all images regardless of rights. It also does not always attribute the image correctly, a link to the top level domain not even the page the image is on. And when that TLD is Google, that’s even worse. Now, there’s a lot of things wrong with copyright, but the fundamentals are correct – the person who owns an image decides what can be done with it. Although the copy and share behaviour is common, why should this service encourage it without even trying to atrribute images to the owners or original posts.
So Pinterest may be current darling of the tech world and having massive growth, but I’m not happy with it…
