While Instagram is busy launching updates on a weekly basis, Pinterest was nowhere to be seen. We hadn’t heard of a significant update in a while. Now, CEO Ben Silbermann says things are about to change, as they roll out the biggest facelift the platform went through since launch, in the following days #softwaremagic
Silbermann says he put a team of 30 engineers and designers to work on making Pinterest faster and sleeker, while trying to get out from the stigma of an “only-women” social media platform. After all, last year, US marketers spent $100 million on advertising, showing that Pinterest has great potential.
The visual changes are nothing too drastic, in the sense that the team has worked on making Pinterest more minimalistic, removing more than adding. The idea is to make the plaform the “dominant global visual search engine”: “We’re trying to build a catalog of ideas for the entire world,” he said for Wired. “It’s only as good as the diversity of ideas inside it.”
In that sense, the company has worked on providing pinners culturally relevant images through algorithm tweaks while making them universally readable. There are 31 languages supported by the platform now, with personalized fonts for each culture: Kanji, Roman, Cyrillic, etc.
By using multiple processors at the same time, Pinterest is able to prepare the next images while rendering the one your are browsing, meaning the loading is 3 times faster. Moreover, the engine got intelligent preloading – Pinterest will sense what images your more likely to be interested in and load those first.
“Pinterest is about matching you with the right ideas.”
A flexible page design should suit all screeen sizes and devices, making pins the focus of your attentions, not other buttons and gimmicks.
If you own an iPhone or iPad, you’ll start noticing the changes today. As for Android and web, they’re “next on our list to tackle, so keep your eye out for updates in the coming months.”
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