Everyone knows about social media website giants like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and more recently Google Plus.
One social media up and comer you may not have heard about just yet is Pinterest.
If you haven't - it should be your next stop, because recent stats show it's traffic is the third most referred in the world (beating out LinkedIn).
Not bad for a website that still is in beta and requires an invitation to join.
What Does Pinterest Do? Pinterest is a social media website that is based on the concept of a "pinboard".
It works much like a bulletin board or corkboard in your house, where you use literally pin up scraps of some of your favorite clippings and images of things.
Pinterest is just like that (only on a website).
You can "add a pin" for an image or page (with an image), and then categorize them in groups.
After that the social media aspect of the website takes over as your profile has a "feed", you can "follow" other people (and they can follow you), and you can "re-pin" anything other profile feeds to your own.
If you have a lot of followers and pin something of great interest, you can see how quickly it would be "repinned", etc.
What Does Pinterest Do Other Social Sites Don't? You might wonder, how could a social media site like this with just one purpose, become as wildly popular (in such short time) as Facebook or Twitter? Facebook is a social media website where you follow family and friends (not interests).
Since the connections are made via people you are supposed to know, it's not exactly the greatest way to follow an "interest".
Twitter is a status website, largely driven by cell phone usage and SMS text message updates.
You can use hashtags to follow what's trending, but because of the mobile and SMS usages - it's not exactly well suited for image or image sharing.
LinkedIn is for business relationships and connections.
While it does have groups for certain things, they largely related to business and technology.
If your passion is painting sea shells, you probably won't find much about it there.
What Pinterest does is allow you to easily and quickly find more information (visually) about things that interest you.
Go to the Pinterest homepage and type in "sea shells" and you'll see exactly what we mean.
You really can't find information on an interest this easily anywhere else.
What about Google? Where Pinterest shines is it's ability to quickly get you more information (visually) about nearly any topic without a bunch of unrelated or poor results.
This is something Google has struggled a lot with in recent years.
Pinterest clearly meets a need that was not being met, and that's why it's grown so virally in recent months (people just love it).
At this point if Google adopted a version of search results like this, it probably still wouldn't be so popular.
Why? Because Pinterest content is added solely by humans manually pin by pin.
That's why (in most cases) the results are so stellar.
What's Next for Pinterest? You can never be sure what features they might add next, but we would be that Pinterest will be actively courted for buy out by all the major web companies and the very near future.