Home, Arts and Crafts, and Style/Fashion are the most popular categories on Pinterest, a third-party study released Monday indicates. According to business intelligence firm RJ Metrics, 17.2% of all pinboards are categorized under Home, followed by Arts and Crafts (12.4%), Style/Fashion (11.7%), Food (10.5%) and Inspiration/Education (9.0%). Of those, food is the fastest-growing category. It’s also the category that gets the most repins, generating on average more than 50% repins than the second most reshared category, Style and Fashion. The results were drawn across a sample of approximately 1 million pins across 9,200 different users.

“I was Pinterest’s first investor.” That’s a sentence I bet you wish you could say. Here at SXSW, I find myself sitting opposite angel investor Brian Cohen who happily owns that distinction. In other words, he found, as he calls them, a couple of young guys from NYU (Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp) at a business plan competition where angel investors “forage for new opportunities.” The rest is startup legend. Cohen, who has a background in publishing and is now the founder and chairman of the New York Angels, wanted to talk about what it was like to work with Pinterest in those early days, how the idea for Pinterest blossomed out of a different project Silbermann was working on, and what makes the Pinterest team different and therefore successful. There are … Continue reading →

Gone may be days of sitting next to a screaming baby or in front of a “kicker” on your flight. Airlines are now offering passengers the option of choosing their seatmates based on social networking profiles. This month, Dutch airline KLM began its new social-seating program, Meet and Seat, which allows customers to upload personal information from their Facebook and LinkedIn profiles and use the details to choose their seatmates on flights. “For at least 10 years, there has been this question about serendipity and whether you could improve the chances of meeting someone interesting onboard,” Erik Varwijk, a managing director in charge of passenger business at KLM told the New York Times. “But the technology just wasn’t available.” Varwijk told the Times about 200 passengers have participated so far.

Facebook, a service built on real names and real identities, will tomorrow start allowing prominent public figures to verify their accounts and then opt to display a preferred nickname instead of their birth name. Those with verified accounts will gain more prominent placement in Facebook’s “People To Subscribe To” suggestions. Verified accounts are not a departure from Facebook’s policy that users sign up with their real name, as birth names will still be shown on a user’s profile About page. Instead it’s a way to ensure people don’t subscribe to the public updates of impostors. It will also arm Facebook for its battle with Twitter to control the interest graph.

One of the Web’s oldest portals, MSN, is about to dive headfirst into one of the Internet’s hottest trends: Social Media. No, Microsoft, which runs MSN, is not launching its own social network. Instead, the 17-year-old content destination is unveiling a new social reader, msnnow, on Facebook, the Web and in a new web-based mobile interface. The initiative is actually two components. According to MSN General Manager Bob Visse, a team of 20 editors will use a new Demand Dashboard to measure velocity and volume of trending topics across Facebook, Twitter, the Bing search engine and BreakingNews.com (a joint MSN/NBC venture). Stories that are trending will appear on msnnow in a constantly updating “Biggest Movers” box. In addition, a team of editors will select topics and stories from among those social (and search) trends and … Continue reading →