Social Discovery Sites, Next Big Thing?
You might of heard buzz about the new social discovery site Pinterest recently, how it's the next big social media site, poised to take off. Recently the site broke the top 10 social sites for the month of November 2011 based on total visits. According to a report by Experian Hitwise, Pinterest received 11 million visits for the week ending December 17th of 2011. This is impressive growth for a site that still requires an invitation to join.
It makes you wonder if the demand is for social discovery sites in general or if it's secondary demand for the Pinterest brand specifically. You have to think that Pinterest is the leader and who everyone wants to write about, but there are other social discovery sites out there, perhaps with some advantages over Pinterest.
20blinks.com, based in Amsterdam is another social discovery site that lets users track art, music, crafts, recipes and other trends in collections that lend themselves to images as opposed to bookmarks. Think of these sites as a sort of delicious, but with images instead of text. 20blinks is still in beta but doesn't require you to have an invitation to join. It also seems to be more popular in different demographic, geographic and psyhographic circles. Based in Amsterdam, a good portion of UK folks visit 20blinks, it also seems popular with an younger, edgier art crowd, and it allows sharing from more outlets.
For instance, Pinterest only allows YouTube videos, 20blinks lets you import videos to your collections from a range of video sites. They also have a "Blink it" button that allows users to easily add sites/images to collections right from their browser. So if you don't have a Pinterest invite or want to check out similar social discovery sites, 20blinks is open to the public and worth checking out if you're looking for a visual billboard to keep your collections of ideas or maybe resolutions for the new year?
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