What struck me immediately about Pinterest was the fact that all the users seemed to be female (female user names). I went over to alexa.com and confirmed that, by Alexa's estimates, most of Pinterest's users are female, far more than any of the aforementioned social network or aggregation sites. Also, Pinterest is growing at an astonishingly quick pace, already the 16th most visit website in the US, trebling its traffic in 2 or 3 months.
So, why is Pinterest so popular among only females and what are the implications of this? It wasn't seeded with a particular kind of content. Is there something about the site's design that appeals more to females than to males? If there some kind of network effect where the first users were female, posted things that interested them, told other people about it, and only other females were interested in it because the kinds of content posted only appealed to women?
Is the discourse on the site any different than the discourse on other sites because of this gender difference? At first glance, it seems to conform to the stereotypical norms of female interaction: more supportive comments, less one-upsmanship via crude humor, less hostility (which makes you wonder if the rest of social web is dominated by discourse embodying hetero-male norms if not by actual 14-year-old boys). Of course, maybe we're only looking at a particular kind of female (Alexa indicates that the users are mostly 25-34).
I'm betting that most Pinterest users look at the site as a supplement to their use of other social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. But its interesting to consider the possibility that use of this site, which is essentially a self-selected portion of the overall public, might be eating into time spent on sites that have no gender/race/interest skew like Facebook and Twitter. There are advantages to using "big tent" social networking sites like FB and Twitter, but perhaps as time goes on, they will become places that you feel you have to go to keep up on the goings on of those you know well, those you barely know, and those you don't know. They'll chiefly be tools for social surveillance, places to see and be seen. But they'll stop being the places (or at least the only places) you go to indulge your interests or have conversations and share things with others. Those activities will increasingly become the domain of sites like Pinterest that cater (though not purposefully) to a certain segment of the population that has something in common.
The return to segregated online social spaces isn't simply a recapitulation of the interest-driven message boards of the early internet. These sites will draw people not through people actively deciding, declaring, and seeking out particular sites dedicated to topics, but through much subtler avenues, spreading through social networks that have their roots in the real world. Their content will reflect the collective preferences of their users, which, as strange as it may seem in a technological world in which we were supposed to slough off our corporeal identities, appear to be dictated to a large degree by our physical selves.
