Liz Gannes

Recent Posts by Liz Gannes

Pinterest Does Location: Not Just Pin Boards, but Now Pin Maps

Pinterest on Wednesday launched Place Pins, where content can be saved with a location and then laid out on a map.

The product from the buzzy social site is aimed to help users plan trips and create guides to their hometowns, both activities lots of them already tend to do.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann said at a launch event at the company’s San Francisco headquarters that the site’s users create 1.5 million travel-related pins per day, with 750 million of them in the system altogether. Now, instead of being displayed like other content on tiled boards, they’ll be shown on maps.

Pinterest is launching the product for Web, Android and iOS at the same time. Users can send boards to friends with a couple clicks, and then can use them on the go from their phones.

The maps were built with the help of Foursquare, Stamen and MapBox, which is why they’re prettier than the usual Google or Bing Maps. Partners like Airbnb, Yelp and TripAdvisor are also providing structured data that shows up in the pins.

Place Pins are part of Pinterest’s larger mission to get people offline: To “inspire you to go out and do things you love,” Silbermann said.

Plus, more than three-quarters of Pinterest’s traffic now comes from mobile — it has been the majority of traffic since August 2012.

Over the past year, the company — which is now valued at $3.8 billion, even though it has no revenue — also introduced features that structure pins about recipes, online shopping and articles.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik