Now you can send pins directly to your friends and fellow pinners from the web or your phone. You can even include a message to give it a more personal touch!

In other words, private messaging.

In a world where any notification is signal, a new instrument of notification is something marketers track closely.

That’s why we’re talking about this.

Pinterest DM me so I know it’s real.

pinterblog:

Have you ever seen a pin you knew a certain friend or family member would love? Now you can send pins directly to your friends and fellow pinners from the web or your phone. You can even include a message to give it a more personal touch!

Just tap Send from either web or mobile to send a pin. You can send pins to fellow pinners (if you both follow each other), Facebook friends, or email contacts. We’ll show you the most recent people you’ve sent pins to for easy access.

Your friend will see the pin in their notifications or in their email.

If they repin, like or comment on the pin, we’ll let you know through notifications, too!

It was possible to send pins before, through e-mail, but we’ve made it even easier. We’ll be rolling out this feature over the next few weeks. If you can’t send pins yet, sit tight and you’ll be able to soon.

We hope you’re excited to send pins to your friends!

—Sunny Rochiramani, Software Engineer, Currently obsessed with pinning to dessert

Pinterest hasn’t had a 1:1 relationship between events (Follows, Likes, Repins, etc) and notification emails for a while. This isn’t unique to Pinterest. For example, Twitter often “clusters” a group of your new followers into a daily notification email.

Where Pinterest is different, though, is that its on-site activity feed is incomplete/ephemeral. Stuff slides off the timeline, fast. (Compare to Twitter, which lets you scroll back in time until forever ago.)

Pinterest’s blink-and-miss-it activity feed creates some management pains for brands (and social pains for personal use) so it’s great news that they’re improving it.

This hasn’t gotten pushed live yet, so all we have is a screenshot to go on. Honestly, it still looks tough to navigate if you have a lot of events to scroll through, but it’s definitely better than before.

This change is part of a long list of updates/improvements to the new Pinterest UI.

“Recent Activity got an upgrade! It’s now located in the upper right corner. You’ll know when someone follows you or your boards; repins, likes or comments on your pin; or mentions you. You can even see older notifications.”

-Better search: Now we’ll suggest search keywords as you type. If you’re looking for “bacon,” you might see suggestions like “bacon roses” or “bacon desserts” (Yum.)

pinterblog:

Since we announced our new look, we’ve gotten lots of feedback from our community about things you love, things you miss, and things that could make Pinterest even better. Thanks to you, we’ve made some changes that we want to share with you today.

Stuff we’ve brought back. Hooray!

-See it now: After pinning, you can check out related boards or go straight to your pin by clicking “See it now.”

-Pinned from: Lots of you told us you missed the “via” feature, because it helped you find other people with tastes like yours. Now when you click on a pin, you can see who it was pinned from.

-Mentions: You can mention your friends in pin descriptions and comments by typing “@” before their name.

-Find friends: You can see which of your Facebook and Twitter friends are on Pinterest.

Stuff we’ve improved:

-More notifications: Recent Activity got an upgrade! It’s now located in the upper right corner. You’ll know when someone follows you or your boards; repins, likes or comments on your pin; or mentions you. You can even see older notifications.

-Better search: Now we’ll suggest search keywords as you type. If you’re looking for “bacon,” you might see suggestions like “bacon roses” or “bacon desserts” (Yum.)

-New pins (coming soon): We’ll let you know when new pins have been added to your home feed.

Stuff we’re still thinking about…

We know there are other things you’d like to see on Pinterest—like the ability to rearrange your pins, search for your pins, know when you’ve pinned something already, or create a board within a board.

We take these suggestions to heart, but it’s tricky to make them work for everyone. Some people don’t have a lot of pins, for example, so they don’t need boards within boards. We’re listening, though, and we’ll keep looking for ways to organize your stuff on Pinterest.

Thanks so much for sticking it out with us as we work together to make Pinterest better. We hope you like these updates, and keep that feedback coming!

P.S. We’re still rolling out the new look to everyone. If you haven’t gotten it yet, you can click on the “Get it now” button located at the top of your home feed.

—Cory Carpenter, Product Manager, Currently obsessed with pinning to Ideas for bedtime stories

What Pinterest is calling a new “look” is less of a redesign, and more of a new version. There’s lotsa new stuff (“related” Pins, a la YouTube, huge discovery flow), and a lot of removed stuff (bye-bye “origin” trail, a la Tumblr, pout).

Many of these changes are of interest to marketers, but this post is gonna focus on the biggest one: The Twitter social graph (aka, “friend finder”) is now completely accessible in Pinterest.

In other words: you can find your Twitter community, and they can find you, in a much more straight-forward way.

Twitter social-graph access is a critical tool for marketers and businesses on social platforms, because Facebook friend-finding is pretty much useless for businesses: Pinterest lets you connect to your personal Facebook account, but your business’s hundreds/thousands of Facebook Page Likers are lost in a black hole, inaccessible to your business’s new presence.

Twitter’s all-accounts-are-the-same (no distinction between “real person” and “business page”) structure works much better for joining new networks, and bringing over a community.

But until now, Pinterest had been kinda half-assed about Twitter social-graph access.

In the old Pinterest, at time of sign-up, you got a decent one-time pass at finding your Twitter buddies. But after that, you only got occasional email about Twitter friends joining, and a wacky, peekaboo feed that came and went with some of your Twitter friends (not clearly marked as Twitter friends, btw).

When you clicked “see all” you were brought to a Find Friends page that DID NOT INCLUDE TWITTER, just Facebook, even though it was just showing you a preview of Twitter friends. This has driven me crazy for a year+.

Now let’s look at the new Pinterest Friend Finder.

This is more like it! Here are your Twitter friends!

Yay. Nothing like not having to rebuild your community from scratch.

Big + welcome news.

PS- It’s worth noting that this does not require you to declare your Pinterest account a “business” account, or to have verified your website. The Twitter social graph access applies to all accounts who have upgraded to the new Pinterest.

PPS- the new Pinterest is not without some bugs/unfortunate changes. While I’m very enthusiastic about the new Twitter social graph access, I still recommend a fully considered evaluation before upgrading your Pinterest account.

On January 28th, Pinterest announced a redesign (as a “test,” not pushed to all users).

(Not gonna go over all the changes here. This is more of a bug report/public service in case you’ve Googled this issue. #hero)

On the current Pinterest, as with many social platforms, you can reference other users by typing the “@” symbol and starting to type their name. Pinterest then auto-completes this. (On Facebook this is called “tagging,” on Twitter, “atting” or “@-ing”.) (screenshot above, with functional tagging.)

On the new/beta Pinterest redesign, you can type all you want, and Pinterest doesn’t auto-complete nada. The cursor just hangs there and waits lifelessly for you to do all the work yourself, like it doesn’t know you.

I see you, Pinterest.

Bug report: filed.

For now we Deal With It.

thanks for the tip, @raydennis.

TL;DR: I’m making a field guide for agencies and brands who want to avoid getting snagged in spammer nets on social platforms like Twitter, Pinterest, and Tumblr, and now is the time to let me know what you need included in it.

(breathe)

As my Twitter family saw earlier today, I’ve been conducting some live-editing parties (they get pretty crazy, *nerd snort*) on Google Docs for a new field guide that will be released in 2013 all about…

RATE LIMITS ON SOCIAL PLATFORMS

</voice of God>

Basically it’s all about Twitter Jail, Pinterest Jail, getting annoying captchas thrown atcha every other second, and getting suspended… when you’re an innocent agency just minding your own marketing business.

This field guide is not for agressive marketers. It’s for agencies and brands who manage lots of accounts, and accidentally get treated like spammers. #injustice

As people who’ve been in on the Google Docs editing sessions know, there is already a lot of structure and content, but it’s not too late to throw stuff at me about what you/your agency needs included.

The usual contact methods:

twitter @bluechoochoo
tumblr [reblog this post w/commentary or send Tumblr Mail]
email: lilbluechoochoo [at] google’s mail situation

If you wanna be kept in the loop, sign up for the mailing list.

(screenshot/preview from live-editing session below. Ripped from the Google Docs)

[Update, December 13th. According to the Daily Dot, Pinterest is saying the Twitter Card support was “just a test,” and that they’re pulling it while they evaluate results. (Less clicks? More?) That said, while the integration has changed, it still exists. There is a clear thumbnail and text preview of any Pinterest.com Pin URL. It’s unclear if this is what Pinterest considers “pulled,” or if integration will disappear completely.]

[Update 5 days later, December 11th: Pinterest seems to have added Twitter Card support on December 7th, the original date of this post. It’s now December 11th. Hundreds of thousands of words have been written about Instagram dropping Twitter Card support. Very little on Pinterest adding Twitter Card support (Pinterest is a HUGE site, with- wait. Do we really have to describe how big Pinterest is?) Shout-out to Pinterest for being chill about this.]

Very cool. Sometime today (December 7th) I started noticing Pinterest peek-a-boos in tweets.

Pinterest has added Twitter Card support!

Expand a tweet and catch a peek.

Try. Before you buy.

A reminder that Instagram has disabled Twitter Card support, and is doing away with in-tweet previews altogether.

The next time you have a motivational quote screenshot to share on Twitter, please reconsider Pinterest.

Just calling this out:

Starting today, we’ll be gradually rolling out a test that enables anyone to create three secret boards. 

A test.

Secret as in Santa. Secret as in seasonal.

Not Private as in permanent.

Any other social network woulda called this “Private.”

Not like I’m Sherlock Holmes over here:

Thanks for all your feedback, and for trying secret boards with us! 

So they’re trying it out. They know people have been dying for any sort of access control. But don’t quiiiite wanna commit to offering it.

Christmas is the perfect cover. 

Respect. 

pinterblog:

The holidays are a time for being with family, sharing great meals, and, of course, surprising your favorite people with a special gift.  That’s why we thought the holidays were a perfect time to test one of our most frequently-requested features: secret boards! Starting today, we’ll be gradually rolling out a test that enables anyone to create three secret boards.

We hope that secret boards will make Pinterest even more useful. You can use secret boards to keep track of holiday gifts, plan a special event, or work on a project you aren’t yet ready to share with the rest of the world. You can keep your secret boards to yourself or invite family and friends to pin with you.

To create a secret board from the web, visit your profile and scroll down to the bottom. Then, click Create a Secret Board. You can also click Add+ on the top right-hand corner of Pinterest to select Create Board and turn the Secret button to On.








If you’re on your mobile device, first download the most recent version of Pinterest for iPhone, iPad, Android phone or Android tablet. 


Then, go to your profile, tap on the Boards tab, and scroll down to the bottom until you see a button that says Create a Secret Board.









When you add a pin to a secret board, it won’t show up anywhere else on Pinterest—the only place you can see it is on your secret board.  Right now, you can’t make existing boards secret because others people may have already repinned from your board.  See this support article to learn more about secret boards.

Finally, secret boards were not on the horizon when we last revised our Privacy Policy, so we’ve updated that document. While we were adding secret boards to the policy, we also took the opportunity to simplify the overall language of the policy and provide more examples.  We think the result is a much clearer and more understandable policy for the non-lawyers who use Pinterest.  In addition to this blog post, we’ll be sending an email notification about the privacy policy update.





Thanks for all your feedback, and for trying secret boards with us! We hope they’ll be a big part of your holiday planning and we can’t wait to hear how you use them.  Tell us your plans in the comments!

—Evrhet Milam, Software Engineer, Currently obsessed with pinning to shoes.

In social media, so much stuff is undocumented by social platform vendors:

• What is the specific maximum number of tweets you’re allowed to send per hour? (You get 1000 tweets per day. But beyond that, it gets fuzzy.)
• Why does Pinterest sometimes tell you “Slow down, you’re Pinning too fast?” What, exactly, is “too fast?”

You don’t have to be a spammer to hit limits when you’re doing something creative on a social platform [example: Firstborn’s epic Pinterest hack for Uniqlo].

So how do you figure this stuff out? Well, if you’re a huge brand spending a bit on paid media, you may have an account contact inside company who can feed you the inside dirt.

But another great way of figuring out all this undocumented stuff is hanging out with spammers/blackhat marketers (not in real life. in forums, chat, etc). As annoying as hearing about Viagra on Twitter is, the people behind those accounts actually talk to each other and share stuff they’ve figured out about Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Google+, etc.

I’m not very interested in the field of “security” (firewall rules? zzzZZZZ). But there are areas of the domain that actually end up being really related to modern marketing.

For this reason, my ears and eyes perk up around stuff like Trend Micro’s recent research paper: Russian Underground 101 (warning: PDF link). (source of the image above)

While half of it is about straight-up illegal, destructive stuff that in no way would benefit a legit business (denial of service attacking a call center?!? yikes! (and also: why?)), the other half dances around stuff that any hands-on social media marketer has to interact with if he/she is a power user: proxy servers, VPNs, seo, traffic.

Trend Micro’s report is a read-only, and extremely high-level survey of the field. WiredUK(quoted below) wrote a feature with an hacker-heavy interpretation of the report.

Ultimately, the i-want-to-hack-a-person (boo!) communities are quite different and usually separate from the i-want-to-hack-a-platform communities. The latter will get you much closer to understanding modern platforms. Stuffy suits and law and enforcement tend to conflate the two. (For example, the reports covers both.) But  basically if you’re a marketer: the former is a bit more boring/irrelevant.

So what’s the lesson for today? If you’re never satisfied with social platform documentation, you gotta stop depending on “official” documentation, and start listening to some shady characters. Turns out, they’re pretty reliable.

If you don’t wanna bother with that, you can subscribe to my mailing list, but I’m way more boring than spammers.

If you want to buy a botnet, it’ll cost you somewhere in the region of $700. If you just want to hire someone else’s for an hour, though, it can cost as little as $2—that’s long enough to take down, say, a call center, if that’s what you were in the mood for. Maybe you’d like to spy on an ex—for $350 you can purchase a trojan that lets you see all their incoming and outgoing texts. Or maybe you’re just in the market for some good, old-fashioned spamming—it’ll only cost you $10 for a million e-mails. That’s the hourly minimum wage in the UK.

Short version:

If you followed Pinterest’s Tumblr (blog) from inside Tumblr, you have to refollow it, because they made a new one.

Long version:

africaistheefuture:

Growth! @Pinterest moving blog from Tumblr to onsite

pinterest:

The Pinterest blog has moved. Please visit blog.pinterest.com

Pinterest didn’t move off of Tumblr, they’re still on it. Their blog post wasn’t very clear.

But if you’re on Tumblr, you do have to re-follow it.

Why the confusion? They set up a new Tumblr. (If you wanna get technical, their old Tumblr was “pinterest” (.tumblr.com) and their new Tumblr is “pinterblog.”(.tumblr.com). Both are/were mapped to http://blog.pinterest.com.

Old (Dashboard screenshot)

New (Dashboard screenshot)

How I figured it out:

Last night Pinterest tweeted a new blog post, that didn’t show up in my Tumblr dashboard. Confused, I visited it, and the Tumblr “follow” button appeared, despite the fact that I already followed Pinterest’s Tumblr. (Or so I thought. Mystery! Intrigue! *X-Files song.*

They might have done this because they wanted a group Tumblr, and you can’t make your primary Tumblr a group Tumblr.

They also changed their avi + theme. (Looks great!)

As of now, the old Tumblr still lives at http://pinterest.tumblr.com.

RIP, that tumblr/theme. 

So… just to recap: If you followed Pinterest on Tumblr, you have to refollow, coz technically it’s a whole new Tumblr.