“MILFs” trended.

So many motherlovers.

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.

[Update March 20: Looks like the Sexual Favers have flamed out. Way less chatter about “favorite bots” as of March 19th]

original post:

Feelin’ on fire lately?

Think you’re a regular @robdelaney?

Sorry, baby. Those favers got a tweet in every port.

Spammers are exploiting a small inefficiency in how Twitter does rate limits/ suspends new accounts.

In general, new accounts have a tighter leash than aged accounts, and anything that just starts spewing links or @-ing people gets shut down fast. 

However, the leash gets a little looser when it comes to favoriting tweets- and the world of weird spam has figured this out, so they’re spawning (and willing to let rapidly die) sexual favers.

I predict Twitter will soon adjust the “tripwire” for new accounts to include favorite activity as well.

“To anyone unfamiliar: This write-up explores a subset of Tumblr and deeply mischaracterizes the broader network.

There are certainly reclusive communities living on Tumblr, but it’s also home to millions of very extroverted (and very talented) creators who have built an audience of 170 million people.

There’s certainly a busy (and hilarious) corner full of memes and GIFs, though you’ll find topics like fashion, music, or illustration with bigger footprints.

It’s easy to generalize Tumblr. With 43 billion posts, whatever you find you’ll find a lot of it. But the diversity (of people, genres, and media) is something we cherish and do everything we can to support. It’s easy to miss if you spend all your time hanging out in one corner. So, yes – it’s not what you think!

Also, it’s “tumblelog”, though we just call’em blogs these days. :]”

/via comment from Tumblr creator David Karp, left under a mischaracterzation of Tumblr

Again:

“It’s easy to generalize Tumblr. With 43 billion posts, whatever you find you’ll find a lot of it.”

Related: the psychological misstep, confirmation bias.

You may regularly hear the following about Tumblr:

• “Tumblr is for hipsters.”
• “Tumblr is just porn.”
• “Tumblr is good if you’re into Japanese animation.”
• “Tumblr is full of middle-schoolers.”

When explaining Tumblr to anybody even remotely familiar with Twitter, I often compare the two (Tumblr often bristles at comparisons to Twitter, but they have so, so much in-common, both in terms of structure/interactions, and user activity). There are many styles and genres on both platforms. Down-to-business feeds, conceptual art (weird twitter: seapunk tumblr, you feel me?), glossy promos, emo tweens, endless/rigorous political threads… ) But mostly: they are a format, not a style or flavor of content.

Because Tumblr has few/highly curated discovery tools, it can be hard to see what exactly is goin’ on in there, and that’s one reason why it’s constantly underestimated/mischaracterized. But there is a lot going on, both in depth and breadth.

Mischaracterized or not, this debate usually happens between somebody sold on it, and somebody saying it’s a waste of time.

While I’m completely sold on Tumblr, I’m fine with folks not using Tumblr. We should all be so happy.

But when I hear that this same Tumblr-less person is spinning their wheels on Google+ or Facebook ecommerce, then I go into full-on Tumblr evangelical mode.

Get on Tumblr, and get your life.

Sidebar:

• Tumblr For Brands LinkedIn Group 

Related stuff you may wanna check out:

• The four minute (musical!) primer on Tumblr you gotta share with newbies
• Debunking Tumblr Myths: Tumblr isn’t good for business-to-business
• Facebook marketing’s law of diminishing returns

I’ve seen some cynical snorts about Twitter’s new filter attribute in the API (ranking tweets as none/low/medium/high in value).

Y’all are crazy. This is rad. First: the concept already exists (ever seen Top tweets vs All in search results? Only every day.).

What’s new is the API support- why would you not want this available in the API? In general, anything in the app, should be in the API. (Reminder: Y’all get really vocal whenever Twitter gets stingy with the API).

Second, I see the same mofos complain about how “easy” it would be for Twitter to stop spam, why haven’t they solved it, etc.

Like say… when 1 hour-old bot accounts start dive-bombing a hashtag. (img below).

Wouldn’t it be cool to just filter that out? The new filters works towards making that possible.

Now lemme get even more radical: You know those “@-bots” that reply to you if you’ve unknowingly triggered them with some special gift-card offer?

Wouldn’t be cool if your interactions could be adjusted to not show @-replies from say… accounts that were 6 minutes old? This gets way easier if tweets have a rating attribute.

“A stuffed rabbit sewn from velveteen is given as a Christmas present to a small boy, but is neglected for toys of higher quality or function, which shun him in response. The rabbit is informed of magically becoming Real by the wisest and oldest toy in the nursery as a result of extreme adoration and love from children, and he is awed by this concept; however, his chances of achieving this wish are slight.

One night, after the boy has misplaced his cherished china dog, he is pacified through the presence of the rabbit, who attracts more attention from his owner from then onward as a result, to the extent of his promotion to the position of the child’s favorite toy. However, when the toy rabbit’s owner contracts scarlet fever, he is prescribed a trip to the seashore and is pacified upon receiving a stuffed rabbit of higher quality as a replacement for the Velveteen Rabbit, which must be burned alongside all of the other playthings due to potential bacteria.”

im just saying

(plot summary via wikipedia)