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Pinterest redesign, API coming soon

Kathryn McConnachie
By Kathryn McConnachie, Digital Media Editor at ITWeb.
Johannesburg, 16 Mar 2012

Pinterest will roll out redesigned home and profile pages to its users soon, according to CEO and co-founder Ben Silbermann.

Speaking at the SXSW conference earlier this week, Silbermann said the redesign would be focused around improving the online pinboarding site's community elements.

According to Silbermann, the redesign will make it easier for pinners to find other pinners with similar interests and will provide a mechanism to easily trace the original source of popular pins.

The user profile pages will also get a facelift, and Silbermann said the Pinterest profiles will be very different to those of Facebook and other social networks, and will show “a snapshot of what you're about”.

A Pinterest iPad app is also in the works, but the CEO didn't reveal any details about when it might become available. Silbermann also stated the service would look to expand the range of content that users can pin to their pinboards, including videos from Netflix, Hulu and Vimeo.

Pinterest has recently been under scrutiny for its users' potential violation of copyright law, and Silbermann said the company is looking at improving current mechanisms in place to protect copyright.

Notably for developers, Silbermann said the Pinterest API will soon become publicly available. App development could further spur the rapid growth of the site which already reached 11.7 million unique users in January.

Keeping up

In other social media news, Google's fledgling social platform Google+ is soldiering on with its aim to add a social layer to all Google services. This week the service rolled out a much-needed update to its photo organising features.

Engineer on the Google+ Photos team, Isaac Sparrow, announced the launch of “album organiser”, which allows users to sort their photos by time, reorder them, move and copy to different albums, and delete multiple photos at once.

Facebook is also continuously updating its user interface, and this week the social media giant updated the way events are created and managed on the platform. Event creators now have more freedom over the event details that need to be included, as well as more privacy options.

Facebook will also now suggest people to invite to events, and event creators will receive notifications of RSVPs. Those wanting to decline invitations will also be able to do so more discreetly. According to Facebook, the new features are aimed at making the creation of a Facebook event feel more like the immediacy of inviting friends via e-mail, SMS or group messaging.

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