I don’t get Pinterest. I think I have made that pretty abudantly clear in recent months. I have a few “boards,” to which I will “pin” things from time to time (my board entitled “Food porn“) is far more popular than it probably deserves to be, considering the level of inattention give to it. I never, however, browse through other people’s pins the way I might scroll through my Facebook news feed or my Tumblr dashboard. It’s just not my thing.

Don’t get me wrong; I think Pinterest is a brilliant idea, and it has been wildly successful. It just doesn’t necessarily appeal to my particular sensibilities. Maybe it’s because I’m a dude, although I doubt it is as sociologically significant as that (for me, anyway.) Whether or not by design, Pinterest primarily appeals to women, possibly a first for the internet. Of course, this being the world in which we live, someone has to ask how to make a service like Pinterest more appealing to the sausage-bearing crowd. And because it is the internet, it eventually comes back to the question of how many X’s we can post. Perhaps not surprisingly, these two questions overlap.

To review the state of what I will artfully call Smut in Social Media:

• Facebook won’t allow anything over an “R” rating.
• Twitter might let you get away with a little “X” now and then.
• LinkedIn has no idea what you are talking about right now.
• Tumblr saw your three X’s and raised them to a level of perversity heretofore unimagined. Seriously, you are never more than 2-3 mouse clicks away from an animated GIF of activities that Porn Valley might not even know exist.

(Please note that I use the word “smut” in a purely descriptive sense.) Continue reading →