I teach a course about social software at Washington University in St. Louis called From Blogs to Wikis. As part of keeping up to date with that course, I try out new social websites & services. Recently I heard about Pinterest, a new site/service that describes itself thusly:

Pinterest is a virtual pinboard. Pinterest allows you to organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. You can browse pinboards created by other people to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

Basically, as you cruise around the Web & find images that you like or that you want to gather together into various “inboards”, you grab them & organize them on Pinterest. It’s actually a pretty nifty idea & the implementation is well done.

So here’s the thing I found interesting. I signed up, & within a few days I started getting notifications that other Pinterest users were connecting to me so they could see my pinboards & I could see theirs (no surprise, since it’s easy to connect Pinterest to Facebook).

But what I found a bit surprising & then amusing was that of the 20 or so users that followed me, 19 were women! Was the site that focused on women? So back to the site’s Help section I went, where I saw this:

People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and share their favorite recipes.

Oh.