MS. REBECCA ROBERTSFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your community with the world. I'm Rebecca Roberts, sitting in for Kojo. Pinterest is a website where people post images to virtual bulletin boards. The site's 11-plus million users can then click on pictures that are pinned and link back to recipes they want to try or outfits they're inspired by, projects to DIY. Right now, it is the fourth most popular social networking site on the Web, hot on the trail of the top three dominated by Facebook and YouTube and Twitter.

MS. REBECCA ROBERTSSo is Pinterest a useful tool or a passing fad? And what's in it for you, anyway? Here to help us sort through the how and why of Pinterest are, joining me here in studio, Jennifer Golbeck. She's assistant professor at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She's also co-director of the university's Human Computer Interaction Lab. Welcome to the show.

DR. JENNIFER GOLBECKThanks. Glad to be here.

ROBERTSAnd joining us from New York City is Sarah Needleman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Welcome to you.

MS. SARAH NEEDLEMANHi.

ROBERTSSo, Jen, let's start with you. Pinterest had 11 million unique users last month. But we have to imagine there are those in our audience who are not among them. So can you just sort of describe the site for us?

GOLBECKSure. I like to think of Pinterest as like the ultimate photo bookmarking tool. So if you're someone who surfs the Web, and you're looking for, like you said, recipes or DIY projects or clothes and you see things that you like and you throw a bookmark into your browser, eventually, you end up with this huge long list, and you can't see any of the things that you bookmarked, anyway. So what Pinterest lets you do is very easily snap those pictures, stick them onto a bulletin board on your site, and it's laid out very visually.

GOLBECKSo when you go there -- and if you go now, you don't need an account -- you can just look at it, and you'll see that there's just a full page worth of pictures. And they're categorized, and so you can go through and browse other people's pictures. With one click, you can stick them onto your own bulletin boards, and so you can curate a collection of photos about anything you want. They are a lot of DIY projects, food, clothes. I'm sure we'll talk about the fact that, right now, it's a mostly female-dominated site.

GOLBECKBut you can put pictures of anything from any site you find on the Web or that other people have posted to Pinterest, and you can really visually explore a wide range of images.

ROBERTSAnd, Sarah Needleman, as you've been covering Pinterest for The Wall Street Journal, what are some trends that you find people are using it for?

NEEDLEMANWell, they are using it for just, like she said, the do-it-yourself projects, of clothes that they want to bookmark a picture of and say, maybe I'll buy this later, or share it with a friend and say, what do you think of this blouse? They may take pin pictures of furniture if they're decorating a room, and they'll get a bunch of ideas and use that, refer back to it multiple times and, again, share it with other friends and say, what do you think of this? Would this look nice in my house?

NEEDLEMANSo there are many different ways or just to even just remember an image they thought was cute, so you might have a bulletin board of cute pets. And these would be all pictures of animals you found all over the Web, and you just like having them because it's fun to look at.

ROBERTSAnd do you find more that people use it as a way to organize their own stuff if they're planning a project or as a way to find ideas from other people?

NEEDLEMANI would say it's probably a little bit of both. Everybody uses it for different needs and different reasons, but some want to just prepare projects and use that as a source. And others want to just remember things and have them organized in a nice, neat, easy-to-look-at way.

ROBERTSThe website, again, is Pinterest. That can be a little hard to hear on the radio. It's the word interest with a P. And you can join us by calling 800-433-8850. Email us at kojo@wamu.org. You can also get in touch with us through our Facebook page or by sending us a tweet to @kojoshow. And we should say, actually, there were already some comments on our Facebook page before the show began.

ROBERTSAnd we just asked, are you on Pinterest? And the responses there have sort of encapsulated what some of the issues are here. We've got someone who says, no, I'm avoiding it like the plague. It's just another tool to waste precious time. One says she'll listen to the show while pinning. And one says it's pretty addictive. Jennifer Golbeck, do you use Pinterest?

GOLBECKI do. I have an account. I would not put myself quite in the addicted group yet, but I definitely see that it is that way. It's the sort of thing where if you're a visual person and you like photography and just beautiful pictures of anything, you can go on there and spend hours looking through these categories. And some of them are very female oriented, like we've said, but there's a whole section of the site dedicated to, for example, science and nature pictures, which are just gorgeous things, some of them coming from government labs, some of them coming from scientists.

GOLBECKThere's a lot of cute pet pictures, like Sarah mentioned, and so there's a lot of things to see. And all these purposes that we've talked about are ways that people use it. And some of the boards that I have on Pinterest are really just visual. I'll collect things that are all kind of in one color space, and it will have furniture and rocks and bugs and dresses and anything that fits in there. And the purpose of that is just to kind of have a nice collection of things to look at. It looks good when you put them together. So I think all of those comments you got on the Facebook page are right.

GOLBECKIt can definitely suck up some time and be addictive, but it's a fun thing to do and a good thing to do while you're listening to the radio.

ROBERTSAnd, you know, just sort of a digital representation of that bulletin board maybe people have had forever, where you rip something out a magazine, or there's an article you want to get to, or there's, you know, a picture that someone sent to you of a resort that you want to try. And you've just stuck it up with a physical, actual thumbtack on an actual bulletin board, and this is just a way to put that on the Web.

GOLBECKThat's right. And this kind of adds in the best part of the Web to that process because Pinterest really is the digital representation of cutting those pictures out of a magazine and sticking them in a file, except, if you go to a resort page and you take a picture or you go to a food blog and take a picture, if you link that on Pinterest, it's automatically going to link that picture back to the original source.

GOLBECKSo, by putting that visual representation of the recipe or the resort on your pin board, you're also keeping that link to the original page, so you can visually look through the things you're interested in and already have the bookmarks to go see them.

ROBERTSWhich would mean that if I were someone with a clothing line or a resort line, I would sure want people pinning my things on Pinterest. Sarah Needleman, is -- are businesses starting to get in on this act?

NEEDLEMANRight. Well, one of the interesting aspects of Pinterest is that you can share the images you collect very easily. That's what makes it a social network. And for businesses, this is a good thing because, potentially, their products could go viral. So if they were to post a photo of their newest widget on Pinterest and a bunch of people were following that business' Pinterest page and they like the widget, they might share that photo -- they may repin it to their bulletin boards. And then their friends may see it, and they may repin it and so forth and so forth.

NEEDLEMANSo it's a great way for businesses to expose their products as long as their products are items, physical items, as opposed to a service, although even with a service, there are ways to create images that express what it is you sell. And because it's so visual, you can -- you know, you're literally showing your customers, this is what we have. And with the links embedded in it, you can literally take your customers directly to your online shopping cart from Pinterest.

NEEDLEMANSo you post a picture of your latest pair of eyeglasses on Pinterest. A consumer, like me, looks at it. I repin it, add it to my page. There's a URL attached to that picture, so when I click on it, it goes right to the shopping cart. And I may buy it. I may say to my friends, do you think I should buy this? They'll look at it. So it's very social, and it really directly links back to a business' sale venue.

ROBERTSJennifer Golbeck?

GOLBECKYeah, so one interesting statistic to go with that is that Pinterest has really exploded in the last few months. And, right now, it's responsible for 4 percent of cross-site linking, so that means 4 percent of the time when somebody clicks a link and leaves one site and goes to another, that's coming from Pinterest. One of the only sites that's bigger than that is Facebook. Facebook is about 25 percent of all links, so you'll leave Facebook and go to another site. Pinterest is 4 percent.

GOLBECKNow, that's a huge percent of Web volume. So it's something that's really becoming more and more of interest to retailers and online companies.

ROBERTSAnd, you know, it didn't come out of the gate enormously popular.

GOLBECKNo. This summer, it was out and available, and they only had about 1 million unique users a month, which is a good number. But now, six months later, they have 11 or 12 million. So it really -- just in the last few months, it's something that kind of has virally caught on itself.

ROBERTSHow did that happen, do you think?

GOLBECKGood question. If we could figure that out, we'd be (unintelligible)...

ROBERTSWe'll reproduce it over and over again, right?

GOLBECKThat's right.

ROBERTSSarah Needleman, why do you think it happened?

NEEDLEMANYou know, it is a mystery, but one possibility that comes to mind is Etsy, which is a very, very popular online crafts marketplace. They set up a Pinterest page fairly early on. And Etsy has a huge online following, number one. And, number two, the vast majority of Etsy users are women, which is the same with Pinterest. About 68 percent of Pinterest users are women, and they actually account for about 85 percent of the content on Pinterest.

NEEDLEMANSo my suspicion is perhaps there's been some cross-linkage between those two sites. And Etsy brought some of its user base over to Pinterest, although the timing, I can't really say. It may just be one of those things where it just sort of took off. But there is a big correlation between those two sites, and perhaps with the holidays coming, you know, starting in November, people started shopping for the holidays or even earlier and used Pinterest to collect ideas for gifts and maybe some of the gifts were items they found on Etsy and vice versa. And it just sort of perhaps took off that way.

ROBERTSWas it designed to be a site primarily for women? Were women targeted as users?

NEEDLEMANI don't believe that's the case. It was not necessarily targeted toward any demographic. But, for whatever reason, it has appealed mostly to women, and they're putting up a lot of the images. So when you go onto Pinterest.com, the first things you'll see are items that could potentially be categorized as female oriented. So there's pictures of high heels, recipes, cute animals, things that somebody might call "girly." You won't -- we did a search of Jeremy Lin a couple of weeks ago, and not one image came up. Now, that may not be anymore today.

NEEDLEMANBut, you know, you go to some of these other sites that are copycats or piggybacking off of Pinterest, sites like Dart It Up -- actually, that hasn't launched yet. But Manteresting and Gentleman.com, you'll see they've got images of bacon, cars, tattoos, cigars, more "manly items." So those are clearly marketed toward men just by -- in their names, Gentleman and Manteresting. Pinterest doesn't say -- you know, it's not women's Pinterest or anything like that.

NEEDLEMANBut, for whatever reason, it seems to have taken off, first by women and because they dominated the types of images you'll see when you go there tend to be female oriented, and, I guess, maybe it feeds off of that.

ROBERTSLet's hear from Abeer (sp?) in Silver Spring, Md. Welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," Abeer.

ABEERHi. How are you?

ROBERTSGood. You're on the air. Go ahead.

ABEERThe question I have is -- actually, I'm a male user of Pinterest, and I'm just curious and to see if you guys have any suggestions on how you would -- or how Pinterest could attract more male users? 'Cause I do kind of grow weary of my feed showing up with, like, wedding photos and, you know, high heels, things like that.

ABEERAnd, you know, I understand it. And it's fine. But I'm just curious if there are any suggestions for that.

ROBERTSJennifer Golbeck?

GOLBECKSo, yeah, a couple things on that. You know, one is that you're in definitely the minority among U.S. users, who are the dominant sort of users. In the U.K., though, they're a much smaller percentage of Pinterest users, only about 200,000 people. But it's evenly split between men and women. And you're getting very typical male things posted there, cars and pictures of soccer games, more male-oriented food, like the bacon, and electronics. But what I would suggest for you is that Pinterest has a very social feature to it.

GOLBECKSo when you just come in to the site, you'll see all the general stuff, lots of those wedding pictures and things. But you're allowed to follow people, so you can pick out people who you think are posting interesting content or just specific boards that people are maintaining. And so what I would suggest is that you go through -- even if we say only 20 percent of the users on Pinterest are male, that's, you know, still almost 2.5 million men using it. So I would suggest going through and finding boards and users who have more of the kind of interest that you're looking at.

ROBERTSLike the Board of Man.

GOLBECKThe Board of Man is a great example. It's one of the most popular boards, started by a guy who kind of had the same attitude, like, it's a -- seems like a thing for women, and I don't understand. And now, you know, he's pinning a couple hours a day on to the Board of Man, so you might look there. Or for some other men who are using the site that have content that you're interested in, and if you follow all of them, that's the content that you're going to see when you come on to the site. It'll be from the people that you're following and should be more in line with your interest.

ROBERTSAbeer, thank you for your call. We are talking about Pinterest and its role in the social networking world. My guests are Jennifer Golbeck of the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland and Sarah Needleman from The Wall Street Journal. We are going to take a quick break, but more of your calls when we come back. You can join us at 800-433-8850, or send us email, kojo@wamu.org. We'll be right back.

ROBERTSWelcome back. I'm Rebecca Roberts, sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi, and we are talking about Pinterest -- so that's interest with a P -- a social networking site with Jennifer Golbeck, assistant professor with the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland -- she's also co-director of the university's Human Computer Interaction Lab -- and Sarah Needleman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. If you'd like to join us, you can call 800-433-8850.

ROBERTSWe are getting a lot of emails about this topic, not surprisingly from computer users. We have Emmy, who emails to say, "I don't mean to sound insulting, but it sounds like the perfect site for an 11-year old girl, at least the one living in our house, who loves to share silly photos with her friends. Are children allowed to use the site?"

GOLBECKThat's a great question. So the general rule is that, to make an account on any site, you need to be 13. But, with parental consent, you can join a site that's less than that. Children are allowed to use it. But it's not the general audience that you're seeing there at this point. So one question that will potentially come up as we continue this conversation is how the site's going to change because it's becoming more and more popular. I agree that it's the sort of thing that girls that age could really get into.

GOLBECKThe content there is not geared towards them so much at this point. The typical demographics of users are women, and they're pretty evenly split among 20-year olds, 30-year olds and 40-year olds. So an older group of people than those sorts of users, but it's a pretty safe place to go. There's an anti-nudity policy. You're not going to find too much objectionable content on there. So it's something that a girl that age could use and share with her friends. They're allowed to have accounts, but they maybe won't find a lot of what they're looking for at this point.

ROBERTSSarah Needleman, here's a question for you. Aileen emails to say, "Pinterest is a hot topic on my international art quilt organization's discussion list right now. Many people love it, but there's a lot of concern about copyright infringement as the original source of the image seems to get lost with repinning. Is there copyright protection built into the site?"

NEEDLEMANThat is an issue that Pinterest actually recently released a message about to its users, warning that, first of all, you're not supposed to take copyrighted images, and the copyright owner could request to have that stopped. There are processes in place now where copyright owners can protect their images and prevent somebody from pining it. This is pretty new, and I'm not really sure on the details of how it works. But it is a very important issue for copyright holders and for Pinterest.

NEEDLEMANAnd they are working to make sure that certain images are not pinned if the owner of that image does not want it to be made available. The other thing to keep in mind is that when you do pin something that -- say it's at the homepage of a website, the URL that's automatically attached to that photo will be the main page. So if you want to find it again and that main page changes, you may have a problem. So it's best to go in and make sure you're pinning the original source of the image, the article it's attached to, rather than maybe a homepage that changes on a day-to-day basis.

ROBERTSJen?

GOLBECKSo, yeah, there's actually probably a whole hour's worth of conversation on the copyright issues that relate to this. Sarah brought up this great point of Pinterest now offering this code that website managers can put in that will disallow people from automatically pinning things from their site, which is the easy way to do it. But that doesn't really get to the core issue, and, I think, something that would really be of concern to your emailer.

GOLBECKYou can always download an image and then upload it to Pinterest, which is a little bit more cumbersome but still a pretty easy process. And one of the things in Pinterest's user agreement that has intellectual property people worried is that they have a term that says they're allowed to sell any image that you upload. So if I take a picture of a flower arrangement in my house and post it, Pinterest says they have a right to sell that image. So that's maybe an issue for me if I'm a professional photographer.

GOLBECKWhere it really becomes an even more interesting and complex issue is if, say, you have a Flickr account and you're the professional photographer and you say you're not allowed to pin my images, they're all copyrighted, you can't share them, and I download it and I post it to Pinterest anyway, and then Pinterest sells it. Are they violating your copyright? Am I going to get in trouble with that? Could you sue me for giving your image to a place where they've already said they're allowed to sell it?

GOLBECKThose are not issues that Pinterest has dealt with at this point. They're sort of protected in the way that YouTube and a lot of other sites are in that they're not technically liable for copyright infringement if they're just allowing other users to upload things, just like YouTube isn't liable if you upload a copyrighted video. But I think Pinterest is going to eventually have some legal issues to deal with where they're going to have to spend a lot more time thinking about this and sorting it out.

ROBERTSLet's hear from Genevieve in Herndon, Va. Welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," Genevieve.

GENEVIEVEHi.

ROBERTSHi, you're on the air. Go ahead.

GENEVIEVEI just wanted to talk about -- a little bit about how Pinterest has really brought -- can really bring a (word?) together, actually. My family had decided to start some Pinterest boards, and what we do is we sit down on Saturday morning. And my 4-year-old niece will look at all of the pretty pictures of all of the lovely crafts I've pinned on her board, and she'll say, I want to do that one. And so the family spends the day (word?) of Pinterest crafts together.

GENEVIEVEWe actually did our entire Christmas that way. We made homemade gifts that we found on the do-it-yourself section -- and people loved it. I just -- I just think it's a wonderful site.

ROBERTSThanks so much for your call. I have to say, for people who are less crafty than Genevieve and her niece, it's -- it can feel -- it can make you feel a little inadequate. You know, you can go on Pinterest, and you see these extraordinary do-it-yourself projects where people are building their own planters out of reclaimed railroad ties. And you think, wow, I'm not sure I'm in this league.

GOLBECKThere are a lot of things like that on Pinterest, certainly these DIY projects, the same thing with food because you'll get these food bloggers and these beautiful pictures of these incredible desserts. But an interesting thing that I saw a couple weeks ago is one other thing that you find a lot on Pinterest are these sort of motivational workout pictures where you'll have, you know, some girl with all these weights in the gym. And she's super strong, and there's some text that's been over -- that's been superimposed on it, trying to motivate you to go workout.

GOLBECKAnd I saw somebody comment on Twitter, "Thanks, Pinterest. You've made me want to eat 50 cupcakes and also go work out all at the same time."

GOLBECKAnd it does have this sort of aspirational feel to it. The photographs are all beautiful. The food is beautiful. The workouts are beautiful. And it's a lot of things that you want and want to be able to achieve. And it can be intimidating and inspiring at the same time.

ROBERTSAnd, Sarah, we're getting a lot of questions about how it differs from some of the other services out there. What would you say that Pinterest's niche is?

NEEDLEMANWell, you know, it's really early on in the evolution of these so-called social discovery sites. And I'm not sure that Pinterest necessarily has an edge, except for the fact that it was among the first. I mean, if you take the time to build up a number of pinboards or bulletin boards -- however you want to call it -- and you decide that, well, the look of a new site comes out, and that's kind of interesting, too.

NEEDLEMANBut to transfer all that work over to the new site is going to be a real pain, just like all your information, all your friends who are on Facebook. If there was a new site similar to Facebook, switching over would be a real burden, and your friends aren't necessarily on there. So, in some ways, Pinterest has the advantage of being the first to really develop a following in this area. But there are a number of other sites like it. And they're coming up on -- every day, there's new ones, so some of them do have more of a focus. There's a new -- relatively new site called Chill.com.

NEEDLEMANIt's very much like Pinterest, only, instead of sharing photos, people are sharing video. So if you're more into video, you might use that one. Gentlemen.com is a Pinterest clearly for men. Women can use it, too, but it has logo of a man with a monocle and a mustache. And you'll notice that most of the images people are putting up there are manly type of images. So there are many options out there, and some of them are a little bit more specific than others in who they're targeting.

NEEDLEMANBut Pinterest may have an edge on the fact that it is very general. It's not geared specifically toward men or women or any particular age group, and it was one of the first.

ROBERTSSarah is on the line now from Capitol Hill. Sarah, welcome to the show.

SARAHHi, thank you. Just -- I was just wondering. I'm working with an arts and cultural community center called Hill Center on Capitol Hill, and we were wondering if you have any suggestions of how a non-profit could use Pinterest.

GOLBECKSure. So I think the most important thing about Pinterest, and to follow on with the comments that Sarah was just making, is that the reason that people use it and the reason it's so successful -- and its core mission -- is that it's visual. So I think non-profits can do a great job bringing attention and getting links from Pinterest. But the thing to keep in mind is that it's a visual medium. So if you're with a non-profit focused on arts and culture, you probably have access to a lot of really great images that are artistic and beautiful and things that people would want to collect.

GOLBECKAnd that's really how you want to focus your attention on Pinterest. It's not like putting up a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account where you're -- you want to be trying to share general kinds of information or get the most amount of people to come and give you a like or become a fan or to retweet you. Here, you really want to focus on the fact that this is an audience of people who have visual interests, and what they're going to care about seeing from you are these images.

GOLBECKSo for any non-profit, I would suggest find the most visually stimulating things that you have that are going to be reflective of your mission. Put those up there. Be an active user. Participate in the site. And that's likely going to get you a lot of fans and followers on Pinterest, and also start driving traffic from Pinterest to your organization.

ROBERTSSarah, thank you for your call. Also, I should say "The Kojo Nnamdi Show" does have a pinboard. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm eager to check it out as soon as we get off the air. But if anyone out there in audience land wants to go check it out and give us comments on what you think that is doing for you, give us a call, 800-433-8850. Or you can also email us, kojo@wamu.org. So Pinterest is just starting this explosive growth.

ROBERTSIt seems like they sort of -- they -- you know, they figured out how to get a lot of people to find them popular without really figuring out what the end game is, Sarah Needleman. Do you think that's fair?

NEEDLEMANThat is right. As of right now, Pinterest does not have a monetization strategy. It's not clear in how it's going to make money. And, really, it isn't too concerned about it right now. The folks at that -- behind that site are really geared toward developing a following, which, clearly, they're doing, and that's very common. Facebook and Twitter, same thing. They really focus on building a user base before figuring out how they would monetize. There are a number of possible ways that Pinterest could perhaps make money. It might sell targeted advertising.

NEEDLEMANIt might sell data on user's interests. But it's also -- they face the risk of alienating their users who don't necessarily want to see big pop-up ads or do -- don't want their information to be sold and, as Jennifer noted earlier, that Pinterest's terms of use right now are very vague and give the site a lot of freedom to do as it pleases with the contents that is posted. So, with that freedom, it could use that opportunity to make money by selling certain things. And users should keep that in the back of their minds.

NEEDLEMANBut, like I said, this is very common for startups in the social networking space to focus on building a following before making any money.

ROBERTSJennifer Golbeck.

GOLBECKYeah. Sarah is exactly right about all of that, and that Pinterest really isn't concerned with how they're going to make money at this point. But they did an interesting thing as a test run a few months ago where they were looking at making money through affiliate links. So this is something that your listeners might be familiar with from sites like FatWallet, which is one of these sites where you sign up. And if you're going to buy something from J. Crew or L.L. Bean, you click on a link on the FatWallet site. And you get a certain percentage back from that sale.

GOLBECKFatWallet makes their money because they have an affiliate program. So L.L. Bean, for example, will pay them 5 percent of whatever you bought, kind of as a referral fee or as a commission. So Pinterest had set up a little test on their site where when people were pinning images from online retailers, they were using these affiliate links, so they were getting a percentage back if you would follow that link through, say, to a table that you wanted to buy and then buy it. Pinterest would get a percentage back. That was a limited thing, and they said they were just testing it out.

GOLBECKBut that's an interesting kind of model to follow because it's not intrusive with these pop-up ads or big billboards, like Sarah mentioned, that people aren't going to want to see on a visual site like this. But it's a way that they can take advantage of people sharing these images from retailers, take advantage of the value they're giving to retailers by driving all that traffic there, and do it in a way that's kind of hidden to the user, that's not taking advantage of any of their personal information, that's not revealing anything about them.

GOLBECKIt's just saying, we're sending traffic to you, so give us some money back. So that may be something they consider in the future.

ROBERTSWell, it does seem like an obvious model, that it feeds back on Pinterest's interests in having retailers make their images available, right? Because if more people -- if those images are freely pinnable and they're getting a percentage of the sale of people clicking through on those, it all encourages the, you know, free use of those images and all of that. Of course, the dark side of that is that it opens it up to, you know, trolls, saying, hey, look at this cute pair of flats, when, actually, they are being paid by J. Crew to do that.

GOLBECKThat's exactly right, and that's a problem with all sorts of -- these sorts of affiliate programs with online content. So it's something that they'll have to explore.

ROBERTSAnd, you know, this is a model that, as you say, it's used in little bits and pieces in a lot of different places. For instance, on WAMU, if you click on a book that is featured in image there, WAMU gets a percentage of the sales through that. You get all the time people saying, you know, if you're going to buy something on Amazon, get it -- do it through our site so that we get a couple of dollars from the sale. Do people actually make money that way?

GOLBECKSure. It's a really big thing for a lot companies. Like I said, FatWallet operates entirely on that model, and they do it by giving money back to the users. So if they get 5 percent from L.L. Bean, I'll get 2 percent. And they get to keep that difference. There's a few sites that operate like that. I personally think I've -- I'm sort of embarrassed to say this on the air. I've probably gotten 15 or $1,600 back from my online shopping from FatWallet, which means they've made five or $6,000 just off of me. And they have thousands and thousands of users.

GOLBECKSo there's a lot of places that are operating on these sorts of affiliate payments. Pinterest could certainly be one that would make a lot of money.

ROBERTSThat's Jennifer Golbeck, assistant professor at University of Maryland. We're also joined by Sarah Needleman of The Wall Street Journal. And you can join us at 800-433-8850, or email us, kojo@wamu.org. You can also get in touch with us through our Facebook page or by sending us a tweet to @kojoshow. We are going to take a quick break. But, when we come back, more about Pinterest and the social media world in which it is involved. I'm Rebecca Roberts, sitting in for Kojo. Stay tuned.

ROBERTSWelcome back. I'm Rebecca Roberts, sitting in for Kojo Nnamdi. I'm talking with Jennifer Golbeck, assistant professor with the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, and Sarah Needleman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. We're talking about Pinterest, an explosively popular social networking site. If you'd like to join us, call 800-433-8850. We have a bunch of emails asking about using the site.

ROBERTSJonathan says, "Unlike Facebook, I still find Pinterest to be very slow, and it's easy to double-click something because of the sluggish nature of the site at the moment. Other friends have commented on this before. What causes the site to be slow?" Do you have an answer for him, Jennifer?

GOLBECKSo I don't have a well-founded answer, but my guess is that, if they've basically increased tenfold in their number of users over the last six months, they're really just trying to catch up their servers and bandwidth to meet the exploding number of images and users that they have. So it'll probably catch up pretty soon, I would guess.

NEEDLEMANYeah, you should bear in mind that this is a company that started in 2009 -- or the site started in 2009, and they have just 16 employees. This is a startup, and it's going to take a little time for it to figure out how to deal with this surge in popularity. I mean, it grew -- it did indeed grow tenfold over the past six months. And that is a rate that is record-setting for a standalone website, so you have to give it some -- I guess give it a little break there because it is very young, and it is growing at such an enormously fast rate.

ROBERTSAnd, Sarah Needleman, who are the people behind the startup? Who founded it?

NEEDLEMANWell, it was co-founded by Ben Silbermann. He's a former Google, Inc. employee. He's just 29 years old. And he founded a company -- co-founded a company called Cold Brew Labs, Inc. in 2008, and it launched Pinterest -- which is the company's only product -- the following year. And what's interesting is that the company has already raised $37.5 million from Silicon Valley Angel Investors, including Yelp Inc. chief executive Jeremy Stoppelman and also top venture capital firms like Bessemer and Andreessen Horowitz. So it's definitely got a lot of financial support.

NEEDLEMANBut it is a 16-person business, so it's pretty small.

ROBERTSWe have an email question from Inga, (sp?) who says, "Do you think the fact that Pinterest is an invitation-only site will limit its growth?"

GOLBECKThat's a great question. I think that's one of the things that initially kind of improved its popularity. As it -- you know, three or for months ago, I had friends who were using Pinterest. And it's intriguing 'cause it's invitation-only, and it's a little exclusive. And Facebook used exactly the same model when they launched. They were just Harvard, and then they were just the Ivy Leagues. And then it was just college students. And if you could get in there -- as soon as college students would get accepted, they'd get their dot EDU email addresses, and they'd sign up.

GOLBECKAnd it would be this cool, hip kind of thing. Right now, I think you're going to see it sticking with this model of being invitation-only for a while, but it's super easy to get an invitation. If you go to the Facebook page for Pinterest, basically, all that's on their wall are requests for invitations. And you'll get one from somebody immediately. So it's a community where people are happy to invite you. And, I think, once they've stabilized things like this speed issue, dealt with some of their copyright issues, you're going to see it open up.

GOLBECKSo people will just be able to register, maybe even log in with their Google or their Facebook accounts, and the invitation-only part will go away. So I don't think it's going to really slow down or affect their growth. It may limit it a little bit at this point, which is probably a good thing for Pinterest because it lets them not have this huge, huge influx, just a medium-huge influx.

GOLBECKAnd they can try to deal with that.

ROBERTSWe have an email from Riva, (sp?) who says, "Is there a way to block people or create private boards? I don't want people virtually stalking my interests just because they're a friend on Facebook."

GOLBECKSo I'll let Sarah correct me on this if I'm wrong, but, from using it myself, it seems like the answer to that is basically no. You can't create private boards. It's an issue that I've thought about, too, because I have a sort of public space out there. I've got a lot of students, and they can all come and look at my boards now. So I'm careful about what I'm pinning on there and have thought about what it would be like to have a private space. But I don't think it allows you to do that right now.

NEEDLEMANYeah. I would agree. I don't think it allows it either. I'm not 100 percent sure myself. But if you can block it, it's certainly not an obvious choice 'cause I spend a great deal of time on the site. I have not seen that. But that is exactly the kind of way that Pinterest could potentially make money. It could sell private subscriptions, or, if you subscribe, maybe you'll get special features, like the option to color your page or put a special background, have private groups join. So that's a possibility. And I wouldn't be surprised if we see that in the near future.

ROBERTSAnd as the site grows -- and maybe it won't sustain the exponential growth it's had recently, but, clearly, not going to go backwards -- how do you think the site will change?

GOLBECKThat's a critical question for everybody who's using it now and all the people who are going to come in 'cause I've already started seeing some mild complaints from people about how the nature of the content is changing. For example, you're starting to see some of these Internet memes where you'll have a picture and people put text over it. And it's sort of a running joke, and everybody knows about it. Those sorts of images are starting to show up on Pinterest. That's not what it was even a month ago, right? It's generally this very beautiful photography of actual things.

GOLBECKBut now these images of these Internet memes are popping up. Well, that's not what the community is used to seeing that's on there, right? If we start getting a more male audience, which, I think, we're going to. I think you're going to see more of a shift to be even. So you'll start getting more pictures of sports or electronics or the sorts of things we see among U.K. users. That's going to be very different for all those women that have been using it so far, and it feels like a place that's very female-oriented.

GOLBECKSo the changes that I would predict, we're going to get just a more general audience from the Internet, which means all sorts of different kinds of content. It's going to become a little less focused on these beautiful images, regardless of the gender of the people who are posting them, and it's just going to be more anything you'll find online. If you've used Tumblr and you look at the sorts of images there, I think that might be more representative of the sort of content people are going to be providing. I also think we're going to see a shift towards a more even-gender split.

GOLBECKAnd what that's going to do for Pinterest is force them, I think, from a lot of complaints from people who are using it now, to allow people to do a little bit more personalization to filter out some of the content that's not the kind of things they want to see and highlight it to kind of keep it a place where it visually looks like what they want it to be.

ROBERTSWell, I think Tumblr is a good comparison. That's the one that comes up a lot when people talk about Pinterest, and it was there. I mean, so people chose a new place instead of going to Tumblr. If Pinterest becomes more like Tumblr, what's the point of having two? I mean, what's the difference between them?

GOLBECKYeah. I think Pinterest is a much denser and more visual environment. So when you go on to Pinterest, you can easily look at 100 pictures with a couple clicks of your scroll button. Tumblr tends to be more one picture on top of another. There's ways that individuals can modify that. But, generally, it's not nearly as dense, and it's not as visual. So there's a lot more text that you see on Tumblr, so I think Pinterest definitely has its own space. But it's, I think, going to attract the same kind of audience that was using Tumblr, the sort of microblogging, picture-sharing kind of space.

GOLBECKAnd that's a general Web audience that has a much broader set of interests than the even 12 million people using Pinterest right now.

ROBERTSSarah Needleman, do you agree with that?

NEEDLEMANYeah. I'd say, though, one thing to consider is I bet we're going to see a lot more businesses using it, especially e-commerce companies that see this as a great venue for them to sell their products and get their products in the eyes of many more Internet users. And their presence on Pinterest could change it. It could turn off some people. It could do the opposite. But how they go about using it, whether or not, perhaps, Pinterest starts selling business accounts that have different features, it's hard to say. But, right now, there are a number of e-commerce companies that are hopping on to this.

NEEDLEMANAnd there are numerous articles throughout the Web offering tips on how small businesses can benefit from it. And, right now, it's mostly women, moms and crafty types. And, if you start seeing a lot of businesses on there, that might change how people look at it, so it'll be an interesting development over time. But I do expect to see a lot more businesses on there.

ROBERTSMegan emails to say, "This may seem like a silly question, but why does Pinterest need to make money? What costs are involved in maintaining the website? I love that there are no ads on Pinterest, aside from what people have pinned."

NEEDLEMANWell, Pinterest needs to make money because the site does not operate for free. There's enormous amount of servers, enormous amount of coding and programming that goes on behind the scenes to make it possible. There are 16 people who work there who need salaries, and websites just don't run by themselves. It may seem very simple to the user, but there's actually a lot of complexity that goes on behind the scenes in making that site possible. It is a business, and it certainly will not sustain itself if it does not find a way to make money pretty soon.

ROBERTSWell, is one possible business model sell yourself to Google or some, you know, some other giant? Yeah.

NEEDLEMANWell, an acquisition is certainly a possibility. I don't have any sense as to whether or not that's something the folks at Pinterest are considering, or if there have been any offers. It's probably way too early on in its life cycle, but, certainly, that's a possibility. We saw that happen with YouTube, so it's hard to say. But, right now, like I said, it's raised $37.5 million in venture capital and angel investments. So it's using that money for a reason, and it's definitely a profitable -- a potentially profitable venture, depending on how it unfolds.

NEEDLEMANSo it's a very interesting business to keep an eye on, especially given how we saw Facebook go from this free site to now becoming a publicly-traded company.

ROBERTSThe -- we have a bunch of tweets and emails from people talking about how they use Pinterest, and it all reinforces what you both have been saying about it being a visual site. You know, Susie says she uses it for work to share pictures of book covers or graphics. Taylor says he uses it to plan decorating for a new condo and inspiration for paint colors. I don't know that -- if Taylor is male or female. Sorry for using the male pronoun.

ROBERTSJackie says she started using Pinterest to pin photos of decoration ideas for her daughter's wedding. And so, clearly, people are exploiting this very visual aspect of it and the aesthetic of it in terms of looking at things instead of just reading things or listening to things. Is that -- do you think that, with enough users, you will see people who want to get pinned, exploiting their visual aesthetic and upping the game a little bit?

GOLBECKSure. And you're starting to see some advice online right now of how to increase your Pinfluence, is the term that I saw someone…

ROBERTSYou're making that up.

GOLBECKNot -- no, somebody else made that up.

ROBERTSOh, I'm so sorry to hear that.

GOLBECKI wouldn't do that. Yeah, increase your Pinfluence, so how to get people to repin, how to get people to follow you. Now, same sort of question comes up there that we were just talking about: How is Pinterest going to make money, and why do they want to? What's going to motivate people to be spending hours and hours a day on Pinterest and getting more followers and getting their content repinned? For businesses, it absolutely makes sense. For an average user, what are they going to get out of that? That's a question that doesn't have an answer yet.

GOLBECKBut I think people are going to start finding ways to take advantage of what Pinterest may be able to give them.

ROBERTSDo you think how a website looks matters that much, ultimately? I mean, there's a lot of popular ugly sites.

GOLBECKThat's true. I -- so I would argue -- and coming from the Human-Computer Interaction Lab -- that how it looks is maybe the most important thing, actually. This is why you saw the big change of people using Myspace and going over to Facebook. Myspace, if you remember back that far -- 2003, 2004 -- was a very ugly place at that point.

GOLBECKPeople were putting these animated backgrounds, and songs would come up. And it was just hideous, and Facebook was clean and beautiful and so easy to use. And, I think, this is exactly the thing that's attractive about Pinterest. It's clean. It's dense. The images are there. They're very easy to post up there. It's very easy to browse through them. So, yeah, I think the visuals are extremely important. And if they mess that up, they're going to lose a lot of their users.

ROBERTSSarah Needleman, do you use it?

NEEDLEMANYes, I -- well, I started using Pinterest out of research for my reporting on it, and I've been -- I guess I'm a convert now. I really do enjoy it. I'm not one of the obsessive types, but what I found is that, occasionally, I'll see a picture and want to save it for whatever reason. Like, I noticed that Madonna had on a dress at the Golden Globes, and the top part of the dress really appealed to me. And I kept thinking to myself, you know, when it comes time to get married, that's the kind of style I'd like for my wedding dress.

NEEDLEMANNormally, I would cut it out and -- if I had a magazine -- and pin it to a board in my house. But I didn't have a hard copy here. I have one online. I pinned it, and I'll have the URL for when the time comes -- hopefully sooner than later. And I'll be able to, you know, look again at that dress. I saw a bathing suit the other day I wanted to buy for a trip. I wasn't sure about it. I pinned it, asked other people who are following me on Pinterest, what do you think? And I got a couple of responses. Looks great, you should definitely get it. So I find it helpful in that way. It's not earth-shattering.

NEEDLEMANIt's not necessarily changing my life, but it's certainly useful and entertaining. And I've looked at it to get ideas on -- or just to see things that I find fun. And I take a break in the workday, and I see some cute animals or some neat furniture that I had never seen before. So it's fun. It's entertaining.

ROBERTSAnd, you know, I think if we've all learned one thing from the dot-com boom, it's that founders cannot control what their technology ultimately gets used for. But as you talk to the founders, since it is still such a startup, is this what they thought they were building?

NEEDLEMANYou know, I'm not really sure the answer to that question. They definitely set out to build a social network. And they definitely went at it in the same respect that Facebook and Twitter did by focusing on building their user base and not worrying about making money off the start. So it was definitely meant to be a social network, and by social, that means gathering lots of users and having them interact. I don't think they anticipated it would be quite this popular or grow quite this fast.

NEEDLEMANBut they definitely set out with the idea of building what's -- this concept of a social discovery site. And it's very straightforward, and it hasn't, you know, changed dramatically since the beginning. We are starting to see some changes, but the overall layout has pretty much held steady.

ROBERTSAnd, Jen, it sounds like Pinterest is at that stage where they want to grow. They want to be attractive to as broad a base as possible, but they also -- you can't, you know, change things too much from the people who were loyal to you from the beginning. It's a juggle, definitely.

GOLBECKAnd that's something that everybody probably sees on Facebook, right? Facebook has 850 million users, so they're so much bigger. And you get the tiniest, little tweak in the layout of Facebook, and there's this huge explosion of anger about it. So, for Pinterest, you have a much smaller audience. But, on one hand, they're probably a very loyal and invested audience. A lot of these people are spending over an hour a day, pinning things on Pinterest.

GOLBECKAnd so, I think, if they see the same kinds of changes -- little ones they'll probably deal with at this point, but big changes, both from other users or from the site, that you'll get similar kind of feedback.

ROBERTSThat's Jennifer Golbeck, assistant professor with the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. We are also joined by Sarah Needleman, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thank you both so much.

GOLBECKThanks.

ROBERTSI'm Rebecca Roberts, sitting in on "The Kojo Nnamdi Show." Thanks for listening.