Pinterest

How have I managed to live without Pinterest all those years?, I ask! I had applied to it a few months ago, but never heard back from them. Then yesterday, I was looking a the Boden site and they were using Pinterest to show outfits, and then I saw a button "Sign in with Facebook", and I was in!

I have a love-hate relationship with these "Sign in with Facebook" buttons. They are so handy - one username, one password. No need to fill in all sorts of information about yourself. But then, you're asked to allow push notifications and access to location information and all sorts of things, without really knowing what it all means. Recently, I specifically unticked an item marked to allow an app to post on Facebook on my behalf. And do you know the first thing that app did? Post on Facebook on my behalf. I hate that. Really hate it.

But enough of that. Back to Pinterest.

It's a bit like Delicious, a handy way to keep track of things you find on the web, but visually. It's more about creative inspiration. Whereas Delicious is ideal to keep all the technical solutions and exercise ideas I have discovered over time, Pinterest is about beautiful pictures and colours and textures. For me anyway. I love collages, and it's like a big collage to which you can keep on adding. There is nothing to stop anybody from creating a board with YouTube videos on how to replace an iPhone screen, I guess. Some people will use it for recipes. Not me. But you never know.

The nice thing about Delicious, is that you can save your links offline, so if they ever go bust, you have a record of all these links. What happens if Pinterest closes down? Same as Facebook or Blogger, I guess, you're snookered. Unless you printed a copy. That's very 20th century, that. But I have done it. Which reminds me that I haven't printed my blog in at least a year. Better go buy some ink!

One gripe - why do I need iOS5 to install the iPad Pinterest app? That's a shame that. I'm not planning to buy a new iPad, but I don't want to update the iOS, as I know from (second-hand) experience that a whole lot of things will stop working if I do that. Newer isn't necessarily better. But try telling a developer that! I'll just have to continue using it with the iPhone app on my iPad, and I have a handy Pin It button in my Google Chrome on my laptop, so I guess I'll survive!