Pinterest is a bigger threat to Facebook and Instagram

The meteoric rise of Pinterest has been impressive to watch.

Unlike Quora (which I predicted would collapse under both the weight of the pretentiousness of many of its users though also the equal weight of SPAM), I believe Pinterest will be around for a longer haul.

They have the usual SPAM issues to deal with and corporates are piling in fast with carefully manicured social strategies in order to gain from the extraordinary traffic Pinterest can drive to their website.

These issues and others can be managed however and it will be the fun, relevance – and general premise that Pinterest can be whatever you want it to be –  that will pull it through.

It allows for amazing exploration: imagine a visual eCommerce engine.

It allows you to build a quick and visual scrapbook of recipes you’d love to cook; just by looking at photos of food and pinning them to your scrapbook.

For her birthday, my wife pinned photos of the presents she wanted me to considering buying; all I had to do was click through to the websites of the businesses that had uploaded their products/photos to Pinterest.

Facebook – which in my option is more and more spammy every day, and less and less interesting – knows that Pinterest is a serious and growing threat. Its growth would naturally be taking from Facebook.

Apart from the minor detail of listing shortly for up to US$100bn, there is the small issue if photos on Facebook.

Facebook took from Flickr. And now, Pinterest will be taking from Facebook; directly and indirectly.

It is true that they handle different photos for different purposes, though there is plenty of overlap.

Instagram makes photos look great; there isn’t a single photo it can’t improve.

And Facebook knows that.

Letting it fall into the hands of Pinterest would have accelerating a growing problem for Facebook.

Paying $1bn for a tiny, profitless company seems daft on many fronts (). Not so on others… especially if you’re Facebook.