10 THINGS PINTEREST SHOULD DO RIGHT NOW

You know how sometimes you have a friend that you really, really love and care about, but they keep doing stupid shit that's like an 11 on a scale of 1-10, and it kinda makes you wanna punch them in the face? But you can't cause you LOVE THEM, and they mean the world to you, and if they would just stop doing the stupid shit, you would forget about it forever and just go right back to being besties, and never, ever mention it again?

Right, well that's kinda how I'm feeling about Pinterest lately.

Truth time: there is literally not a single website, service, or platform that has EVER come along in the history of my internet browsing days that has excited me, and....well fine, fulfilled me as much as Pinterest.  I'm not being melodramatic here. I love the living shit out of it. 

It's gotten to the point that when I'm feeling angry or stressed, I'm not meditating, taking yoga, or going for a walk (ok, I guess I never really did those things, but still)...nope, when I'm feeling frazzled, the only thing that seems to soothe me is "pinning." I mean, does that sound fucking insane, or what?

But it's so very true.

Pinterest completes me in ways that I never imagined a mere website could. I love it more than certain members of my family. Which is why I get so very frustrated when I think about all the things that are missing. Because really, you're almost there!  It's like we could be SO FUCKING GOOD TOGETHER PINTEREST, if only you'd...

1. ALLOW PRIVATE BOARDS

Clearly I'm not the first one to mention this, and I assure you I won't be the last. But, COME AWN! We desperately need some private boards up in this bitch, Pinterest! Like badly!  

• I wanna pin shit to a board that I made for my husband's surprise birthday party, but guess what Pinterest: IT'S NOT A SURPRISE ANYMORE IF 376 OTHER PINNERS ARE FOLLOWING IT. 
• I wanna pin shit to a board about my amazing, fantastic, so good that anyone who sees it will steal it business idea, but I can't (maybe you wanna invest in it now that you're worth 200 millies, Pinterest?)
• I wanna pin shit to a board that I made for a client who is paying me 1 billion dollars to decorate their private island mansion and don't exactly want other ppl looking at all their rich, important crap, but I can't. Don't you care about the rich ppl, Pinterest?
• I wanna pin shit to a board about the redesign/relaunch of my website that my designer and I can collaborate on, but if it's not private everyone will see what the fucker is gonna look like before it was even relaunched! Kinda anti-climactic don't ya think, Pinterest?
• I wanna pin shit to a board about imaginary weekend houses I wanna buy in the Catskills, but if one of my followers wants to buy a house in the Catskills too, then they will mooch off of all of my real estate listings and BUY MY FUCKING DREAM HOUSE, PINTEREST! Wouldn't that totally suck??
• I wanna pit completely embarrassing shit to a board called "Stuff that will make you look not so fat," but I can't, cause that would be completely humiliating, Pinterest!

Need I go on??

Look, I get that you guys probably think that if you start offering private boards, everyone will just make all their stuff private, and there goes all the success that Pinterest built itself on in the first place...I just think you're totally wrong. Personally, I would have a few private boards, and keep almost everything else not private. I like other people seeing what amazing fucking taste I have, so trust me: I'm still gonna let it all hang out.

2. ALLOW ME TO SEARCH ONLY MY PINS (OR ANOTHER USER'S PINS)

Here's the thing: I think my pins are kinda hot shit. And I spend a lotttt of time adding pins to my boards, keeping them interesting, and just really fanning the flames of my growing pin empire. I also really dig a lot of the pins of the people I follow.

The people I don't follow? Mmmm, not so much.

So when I search for "dark bedroom," I usally don't want to see what EVERYONE on the planet has pinned that's labeled "dark bedroom"...I wanna see what I've pinned. Or what the cool ass mofos I follow have pinned. You feel me?

Now, fine: maybe sometimes I *do* want to see what everyone and their brother has pinned, but I'd at least like the option to limit shit if need be. So let me choose during searches: me, ppl I follow, or everyone. Oh, and while we're at it, I also want the option to search just one person I follow's boards too (so instead of searching everyone I follow's boards, I just want to search all of Sketch42 Blog's pins). 

3. ALLOW UNLIMITED RESULTS

Why do you guys limit my results when I search for something?? I feel like you give me around 2 pages of pins and then: boom, DUNZO. WTH, Pinterest?

When I'm on the hunt for something, I go hardcore. I don't do a search for a couch and then after looking at 10 go: "phew, I'm exhausted! Don't show me any more!" I want to see every last couch that every last pinner has pinned from the start of modern time till now. 

Can't you guys just copy Twitter and do the same thing that they do? Show a limited amount of results and then let us choose more if we want?? Look, I'll even show you a picture: 

All you gotta do is replace the word "Tweets" with "Pins" and you're totally golden! Copy the whole damn thing! I swear, we won't tell!

And while we're on the subject, I also want my stream results to be unlimited. I've almost stopped checking it these days because I just assume that I've missed everything good...and with so few results, I probably have. Let me go all the way into the wayback machine and see em all!

4. ALLOW ME TO GROUP BOARDS

Sometimes I want to create boards for a particular project (like the rich billionaires I mentioned above), and I might even want to create duplicate board titles. Like I have a "bathroom" board cause our bathroom is a shithole and I want to rip it out and start from scratch, but the richie riches need a bathroom board too, and that bathroom board is gonna be way the hell different than my bathroom board. They also need a living room board, a bedroom board (they have 164 in their mansion), and a whole bunch of other boards. And it would be soooo killer if I could save all those boards in one group. Or project. Honestly, call it whatever the eff you want, but pls just let us do it. Pretty please, with sugar on top?

5. GIVE ME SOME STATS

For me, this one should probs be #1, but I'm too lazy to cut and paste it and move it to the top of the page. In fact, I want this so badly, I would totally pay for it. 

I want to see allll sorts of stats. I want to see which of my pins have been repinned the most. I want to see which images have been repinned the most from my blog (and I don't just mean a big blob of a page dump like what you can see if you go to: http://pinterest.com/source/designblahg.com/). I want numbers, I want to see things by month, by all time, etc. 

I want to see which pinners who follow me have also repinned shit from my blog, and I even want to see which other blogs people who are pinning shit from my blog are ALSO pinning from. 

This information would be so knock down, drag out amazing and I think, would literally change the face of blogging as we know it. 

6. COME UP WITH SOME WAY BETTER CATEGORIES (AND SUB-CATEGORIES)

No offense, Pinterest, but your categories confuse the hell out of me. Like really confuse me. 

• Science & Nature? Seriously?
• Why is there a Poster & Prints category and also an Art category? Wouldn't posters and prints go inside the Art category? And maybe be a sub-category?
• And then there's photography...wouldn't photography also go into art? Or do you mean photography tutorials, though those should probably go into a tutorials category except: oopsie, you don't have one. 
• Then women and men's apparel is broken out, but jewelry, accessories, etc is not. Wouldn't this all go under fashion? 
• And what the hell does "People" mean? 

In all honesty, the categories don't really help me at all. Now, perhaps that's because they are so hard to dissect right now, no one has any clue how to categorize their own shit, which makes searching within categories kind of useless. Maybe if we were allowed to choose more than one, or sub-categories, that would be helpful too. Or maybe we don't need them at all...I'm not really sure. 

But if we ARE gonna keep them, I think they need to be way the hell better than they are. 

7. ALLOW ME TO @USERS IN COMMENTS THAT I'M NOT FOLLOWING

So if I'm being really honest, half the time you don't even let me respond to comments of people I AM following. It pretty much goes like this: someone comments on my blog, I go to respond, I @ their name, and then nada. I think "hmm, am I not following this person??" So then I go and check and  lo and behold I AM following them. WTF!? Maybe it was just a quirk. I go back and try to @ them again, and they don't show up on my drop down list ah-gain. MOTHER FUCKER. Now everyone thinks I'm a bitchy "Pin-cess" who doesn't have time to respond to any of the lovely comments left on her pins. 

Le sigh.

I know that this is likely a glitch, but it pretty much happens all the time. So why not (broken record) copy Twitter again!? Let me @anyone who has a pinterest account! Why not?? That would be the easy peasy solution and would get people connecting and chatting and community building way the hell more. 

8. ALLOW ME TO MOVE PINS AROUND ON ANY OF MY BOARDS

I love that you allow me to re-order my boards already, so thanks for that. But why can't I re-order pins within my boards? 

Sometimes I make boards and just randomly pin shit. But sometimes I make boards where I want to tell a story. Like I want you to scroll through and see images in a certain order so that you can better understand how I'm gathering my thoughts. Or maybe it's a gift board and I want to group stuff together like jewelry first, followed by wines, etc. 

I mean, there are million diff reasons someone might want to move pins around, and since this one seems like it would be hella easy to implement, LET'S DO IT.

9. ALLOW ME TO MOVE MULTIPLE PINS AT ONCE

original image via allatonce.org/

Moving pins one at a time to new boards is more painful than childbirth...at least that's what I hear.

But I think most of us have found ourselves in the sitch where we set up a board with a broader focus, and then decide to fine-tune it. Which then means a bunch of pins need to be moved to the more focused board. And it would be supercalafragilelisticexpyaladoughcious if we could move all those suckers at once!

And also! How about if we could pin images to more than one board at a time?? Rather than going through the silly process of repinning one of your own images, and then getting an email telling me that "Erica Reitman has repinned ...." I KNOW, PINTEREST! I AM ERICA REITMAN. 

10. MAKE A NATIVE IPAD APP

This one is a no brainer. Your app would look SO goddamned hot on the iPad, Pinterest! Please tell me you guys are already working on this!?

And here are a few other questions I have that didn't necessarily fit on the list: 

• Why does every pin with a price have to be categorized as a "gift"...this doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to me. I try to add prices to any items I pin (when avail), but 98% of them are not gifts. Unless ppl are often getting you $10,000 couches as gifts? If so, pls introduce me to all of your friends. 
• Why does Pinterest often just not work with Chrome?? Most often, I get this little pop-up that tells me that there is no image to pin on page that I have navigated to. Then I open that shit in Firefox and I have 76 choices of images to pin. How come?
• Why aren't the list of pinners I follow in reverse order?? I want to see the newest people I follow on top and the oldest on the bottom. Sometimes it seems like its in the right order, and sometimes it's not.
• And I left this one off the list in the hopes of not coming off like a total dbag: but it would be cool if the shit that's already there just worked. You guys are getting better, for sure, but I still find that about 20-30% of the time, shit is just broken, not working, not avail, etc.

Anyway, Pinterest, I hope you know that all of this bitching brainstorming I've dropped on your face is done with nothing but love. Cause really, it is. For the most part, you truly, madly, deeply rock.

You've already brought me like a million billion hours of happiness and enjoyment, and I really think that you-n-I are made to last. Especially if you do all the shit I put on my list above. 

Oh yeah, and if you wanna follow my "pin it to win it" ass, you can do so here: pinterest.com/ericareitman