The buzz around the valley this morning is Pinterest’s completion of a $200mm raise led by Valiant. Pinterest, the quasi-social scrapbooking site is a fun way to bookmark the things you love and dream. While this may not mean much to their users, it means a whole bunch to the rest of us in the valley (or those peering in from abroad).

Be Persistent

As users of social networks, we generate an incredible amount of data – Ellis Hamburger’s article yesterday highlights some Facebook stats: “Every day, we get 2.7 billion likes, 2.5 billion status updates / photos, and 300 million photos.” But to what end? This was one of my first goals when designing Notey - I wanted to address the lack of persistence, I wanted to make our words stick.

On ‘Social Networks’, information flows quickly off the news feeds and though EdgeRank resurfaces it slightly longer, it’s quickly out of sight and out of mind. So while Facebook is looking to change our behaviors (slowly) with Graph Search, it’s no wonder a site like Pinterest that beautifully resurfaces data would be successful.

People First

Some might think this is a trend towards monetization – one driven by shareholders and endorsed by businesses and brands but this is more importantly what we as users want. We didn’t want another social network… but..okay.. well it’s convenient and it’s there anyway. We don’t want 1,000 sites to consume information (think ‘review’ sites or those where we dream) – we want to streamline our behavior and we want our data to be persistent.

Beacon of Hope

As a user and new startup founder, thank you Pinterest for being a beacon for ‘what users want’ and validating the space that I’m in. I’ll be persistent.