Interesting topics were discussed over the weekend at the “AngelHack – Hackathon” in Palo Alto, CA. Part convention – part trade expo, AngelHack brings developers from all around the country into one arena, allowing developers to showcase their products and ideas, while hoping for seed capital from prospective investors.
While some of the ideas were hits, and some were misses, the future of one idea wasn’t up for debate. Francisco Guerrero, CEO of Pintics (an analytics tool built specifically to track trends and statistics related to the social media site “Pinterest”), unveiled Shopinterest.co – described as a “Shopify” for Pinterest.
Shopinterest will allow users to utilize their “boards” and “pins” as product thumbnails for a salable product. “Our Pinterest analytics service targets large e-commerce companies,” said Guerrero, “but after we saw the large volume of sales generated via Pinterest, we decided to help regular users join in the fun and profits.”While Guerrero was very excited about this project, he was also careful to not divulge all of the details of it. The public only has a snapshot of what Shopinterest will eventually be, at this point, but it promises to be ground-breaking.
However, it remains to be seen how users will react to the monetization of Pinterest. As the majority of social networking sites are making the move into the “profit” sector, these sites also must carefully balance the relationship between e-commerce and free entertainment; otherwise their viewers/users could easily turn on them and make the site obsolete. (cough) Myspace.
Shopinterest is expected to continue its initial development for the next few months and begin linking shopping carts to Pinterest within the year. While no one can foresee if this project will be a success or a failure, it IS an interesting concept and – if done right – could draw even more users to Pinterest.com
