Pinterest Makes Pins More Than Pretty Pictures

Pinterest tonight said it would be showing directly on its site information like pricing and availability of pinned products, cook time and ingredients for pinned recipes, and ratings and casts for pinned movies.

It’s a totally obvious move that will make the popular bookmarking site more useful and less inspirational (a.k.a. full of pretty photos that don’t actually link to anything). You could think of it like the Pinterest version of Twitter’s Cards.

The added information comes from a whole bunch of stores (e.g. Anthropologie), food publications (e.g. 101 Cookbooks) and movie databases (e.g. Netflix) that have partnered directly with Pinterest. There are some sizable names in there of brands that are willing to pass over a whole bunch of metadata to Pinterest and its 50 million or so active users: eBay, Target and Sony among them.

The features are only available to Pinterest users who have opted into its recent redesign, which was not universally popular but has been modified since launch.