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Pinterest adds visual search to its handy browser extensions
Pinterest introduces new ways for its users to access pinned items on the regular and today it's revealing yet another. Starting tomorrow, you can employ the company's visual search tech to hunt for things from inside its browser extensions. How does it work? Well, you can hover over an image on the site you're reading to find related items on Pinterest without having to leave that page.
Pinterest uses AI and your camera to recommend pins
Last year, Pinterest introduced the possibility of shopping for things just by taking a photo of it. Today, the company is ready to announce that feature to the world. It's called Lens, and as you might expect, it uses your phone's camera. Tap the camera icon in the Pinterest app, snap a photo of something you dig -- say, your friend's cool mid-century dining table -- and it'll be smart enough to churn out a list of pins with similar-looking tables.
Pinterest lowers its goal for female engineer hires
Pinterest aimed to make itself a role model for diversity in tech in 2016, but the year didn't quite work out that way... and the company is setting its sights lower as a result. The social site reports that it increased the number of women in its workforce to 26 percent in 2016, but it only increased the ratio of engineers to 22 percent -- far short of the 30 percent it wanted. It's now aiming for 25 percent in 2017. While the team still wants to get to 30 percent, it says it's "likely going to take more than 12 months" to reach that goal.
Instagram now lets you bookmark photos and videos
For some, Instagram is a place to see what your friends and family have been up to. For others, it's an app for marvelling at beautiful food, furniture and places captured by skilled photographers. Like Pinterest, these photos can serve as inspiration for users' own dreams and personal projects. With this in mind, Instagram is adding a bookmark icon underneath each post in your feed. Tap it and the relevant photo or video will be added to a private page accessible from your profile. There are no folders or "boards," so everything is lumped together, but it's certainly simpler than keeping a text document full of random Instagram links.
Instagram sees shopping as the next step in its evolution
Gone are the days when Instagram's scope was clear-cut. For better or worse, the app is no longer just about sharing photos with other users or scrolling through a river of images with hundreds of digital likes. Since being acquired by Facebook in 2012, Instagram has left behind its roots as an unambiguous social network in favor of becoming a more robust platform. Whether to monetize or to enhance the experience for people, newly minted features like Stories have catapulted Instagram beyond being a simple photo-sharing app. And it's not finished yet.
Pinterest highlights curated content with new Explore tool
After an update last week attempted to keep us all organized, Pinterest has now given its users a new way to get inspired. Following the current trend of apps pushing curated content, Pinterest has jumped on the bandwagon with its new Explore section.
Pinterest helps you keep tracks of things you've tried
You probably typically pin recipes and ideas you want to try or things you want to buy on Pinterest. Its new button, however, was designed to keep track of the things you've already bought or tested out. Now, when you want to share your feedback about a recipe or a DIY idea you found online, you can tap the new checkmark button on Pinterest's menu to signify that you've already tried it. The app will then ask you how it went, and you can tap on either "Loved it" or "Not for me" and leave a note or tip for other users.
Instapaper makes its premium features available for free
Instapaper has announced its biggest update yet since Pinterest acquired it in August: the read-it-later app is making its premium features available for free. The service used to offer a set of special features for $3 a month or $30 a year, but it's now opening up the tier to everyone.
Why the Internet fell apart today
If you were on the internet on Friday morning, congrats! You were one of a lucky few who maintained their connectivity in the face of a massive, nationwide DDoS attack against part of the Domain Name System (DNS), a crucial piece of digital infrastructure which, when offline, cripples our ability to access the internet. But despite its importance, the DNS is often overlooked -- much like the rest of the behind the scene mechanisms that make the internet work. So before you go resetting your router to see if that clears things up (hint: it won't), let's take a quick look at what the DNS does and how it managed to break so spectacularly earlier today.
Pinterest buys Instapaper to rule the 'save for later' market
Pinterest is more than just about collecting Thanksgiving recipes or selecting your dream wardrobe. You can also use the service to save articles for later reading, a feature that's been around since its inception. Well, the company just made an acquisition that'll make saving longreads on Pinterest that much better. Pinterest announced today that it is buying Instapaper, which is one of the most popular read-it-later apps out there. According to Pinterest, the company acquired both the team and the technology behind Instapaper to "accelerate discovering and saving articles on Pinterest." Don't worry, Instapaper fans; the app isn't going away. The Instapaper team will continue to keep it alive as a standalone entity.
Pinterest is betting big on video ads for brands
While showcase site Pinterest is still releasing features in line with its image-focused brand, it's finally expanding its advertising options beyond still photos. Today it's introducing promoted video ads, letting users expand its cinematic pins into full auto-playing vids.
Microsoft's take on Pinterest has you collecting real objects
As popular as Pinterest is, it's limited: with certain exceptions, you're really just collecting internet content. What if you have something cool to show off in the real world? The Microsoft Garage team wants to help. It just launched Thinga.me, a mobile-focused service (currently iPhone-only) that has you collecting real objects. If you want to share your favorite apparel or a vintage toy collection, you just have to take photos -- Thinga.me will cut out the backgrounds and drop them into the themed gallery of your choice. Of course, you can tag and share collections to help others find what they're looking for.
ICYMI: Pinterest's photo recognition and light exosuits
try{document.getElementById("aol-cms-player-1").style.display="none";}catch(e){}Today on In Case You Missed It: Pinterest wants users to shop for items by taking pictures, then uploading to the site to find similar items. Carnegie Mellon University invented an exoskeleton component that would lighten suits and make them far easier to walk around in, minus the bulky metal frames. NASA tested a rocket booster this week that may one day go to Mars. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Pinterest wants you to shop for an item by taking its picture
If you've ever spotted someone wearing a pair of cool boots and wanted to know where to get a pair just like those, you'd be interested in a new feature coming from Pinterest. At an event in San Francisco, the company has just given a sneak preview of a new camera search technology that can let you search for related products on Pinterest simply by snapping a picture of something in the real world. So I could just take a photo of those aforementioned boots, for example, and through a combination of computer vision and deep learning, the app will then bring up a list of results of boots that look similar.
Pinterest nabs Fleksy's team to improve its digital scrapbook
When it launched in July 2012 as an app designed to help blind users type via muscle memory, Fleksy was one of the first apps to bring extended typing features to iOS. Today, Fleksy announced it has been acquired by Pinterest for an undisclosed amount and will be open-sourcing some of it's accessibility features for the blind and visually impaired.
Mark Zuckerberg's lesser-known social accounts get compromised
Mark Zuckerberg's biggest social network presence is undoubtedly on Facebook, but he has other accounts, too -- and he's learning the hard way that those accounts are just as sensitive. Hackers appear to have briefly compromised Zuck's Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter accounts, in some cases defacing them for the sake of bragging rights. It's not certain that they have his personal email address, but that would make sense if it's a common thread between the accounts. It's alternately possible that LinkedIn's 2012 password breach is at fault.
Pinterest Featured Collections highlights local boards worldwide
Pinterest says one of its most important challenges when it transitioned from desktop to mobile in 2012 was to become a global brand. Things are going well for the company then, since majority of its users are now from outside the US. Two-thirds of new sign-ups are from outside the country, and Pinterest expects its next 100 million users to come from outside the United States, as well. The service grew the most in Germany over the past year, where pinners tripled in number. Users in France, Brazil and Japan doubled, and the company observed a significant increase in sign-ups from Russia, South Korea and Mexico. In an effort to cater to a growing worldwide audience, Pinterest is launching a new section called Featured Collections.
Pinterest rebuilt its app to speed up your board browsing
Pinterest regularly adds new features that make using its digital scrapbook of sorts a more pleasant experience. Features like shopping pins, location pins and a search tool that can identify items in a photo all lend a hand compiling your boards. After redesigning profiles to make saving and sorting pins a bit easier, the company has completely retooled its iOS app to tidy up and offer quicker performance. The "new modern look" puts the focus on the pins themselves instead of icons, descriptions and profile images. Pinterest says the app is now "universally readable" as well, supporting 31 different languages.
Pinterest hires its first diversity chief
The US tech industry has had some success in diversifying its workers, but many companies know there's still more work to be done... including those that hadn't made it a high priority until recently. Pinterest has hired its first head of diversity, Candice Morgan, to build initiatives that will shake up the social site's workforce. She isn't the beginning of the company's efforts, as it set goals last summer and just started diversity-minded apprenticeship and internship programs. However, Morgan may be the key to coordinating and ramping up those programs.
Pinterest's redesigned profiles make it easier to find pins later
If you're an avid pinner, finding items on your Pinterest boards can sometimes be quite the chore. Thanks to today's update, though, you should spend less time hunting for what you're after. The online repository updated user profiles to show the items you're most likely looking for first. Recently pinned items and boards are now shown first, as Pinterest says users search for items they've added in the last month most often. You can also browse by topic from your profile or from any board. If you're perusing that "Healthy eats" board pictured above, for example, you can tap "salad" to narrow the results. You can also sort your boards according to which ones were to pinned to recently or in alphabetical order. The new features are rolling out on Android and iOS starting today, so you should see the tools soon enough.
