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Pinterest

Pinterest is an American social media service for publishing and discovery of information in the form of digital pinboards. This includes recipes, home, style, motivation, and inspiration on the Internet using image sharing. Pinterest, Inc. was founded by Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, and Evan Sharp, and is headquartered in San Francisco.

Pinterest emerged from an earlier app created by Ben Silbermann and Paul Sciarra called Tote which served as a virtual replacement for paper catalogs. Tote struggled as a business, significantly due to difficulties with mobile payments. At the time, mobile payment technology was not sophisticated enough to enable easy on-the-go transactions, inhibiting users from making many purchases via the app. Tote users however were amassing large collections of favorite items and sharing them with other users. The behavior struck a chord with Silbermann, and he shifted the company to building Pinterest, which allowed users to create collections of a variety of items and share them with each other.

The development of Pinterest began in December 2009, and the site launched the prototype as a closed beta in March 2010. Nine months after the launch, the website had 10,000 users. Silbermann said he wrote to the first 5,000 users, offering his phone number and even meeting with some of them. The launch of an iPhone app in early March 2011 brought in more downloads than expected. This was followed by an iPad app and Pinterest Mobile, a version of the website for non-iPhone users. Silbermann and a few programmers operated the site out of a small apartment until mid-2011.

Pinterest grew rapidly during this period. On August 10, 2011, Time magazine listed Pinterest in its "50 Best Websites of 2011" article. In December 2011, the site became one of the top 10 largest social network services, according to Hitwise data, with 11 million total visits per week. Pinterest won the Best New Startup of 2011 at the TechCrunch Crunchies Awards. For January 2012, comScore reported the site had 11.7 million unique U.S. visitors, making it the fastest site ever to break through the 10 million unique visitor mark. At the 2012 Webby Awards, Pinterest won Best Social Media App and People's Voice Award for best functioning visual design.

On March 23, 2012, Pinterest unveiled updated terms of service that eliminated the policy that gave it the right to sell its users' content. On August 10, 2012, Pinterest altered its policy so that a request or an invitation was no longer required to join the site. In October 2012, Pinterest launched business accounts allowing businesses to either convert their existing personal accounts into business accounts or start from scratch.

In April 2017, Pinterest removed its post "liking" feature as it seemed redundant to "boards", which are user collections of posts. Users' existing indexes of liked posts were converted into a collection ("board") named as such.

Although starting out as a "social network" with boards, in later years the company has put increasing emphasis in visual search and e-commerce, such as shopping catalogs.

In February 2019, The Wall Street Journal stated that Pinterest secretly filed for an initial public offering (IPO) of stock. The total valuation of the company at the time reached $12 billion. They went public on April 18, 2019, at $19 per share, closing the day at $24.40 per share.

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