✯ Day 255 of Vintage 365 ✯
While Pinterest is by no means a hushed secret any more (it’s already been hailed as one of the 50 best websites of 2011 by Time Magazine), it wasn't until about a month or so ago that I began using it.
Last spring a very dear friend sent me an invite, which I accepted at the time, but for various reasons I wasn't able to devote the time needed then to properly explore the site and all it had to offer back then.
Jump ahead to this past August – after continually seeing mention after mention of Pinterest online – I decided it was high time I go see what everyone was buzzing about.
At its heart Pinterest is a giant online inspiration board. Members find (or "Pin") images (of just about anything you can imagine) online and then bookmark them to their Pinterest accounts.
Pinterest combines the practicality of an online bookmarking service with the seek-and-discover fun of StumbleUpon.com (a site that I was a major user of a few years back).
Users create categories (called boards) within their account and then organize the images they've saved however they desire. Members can (and most do) re-pin items that fellow Pinterest users have added to their boards. This makes for some wonderful communal sharing of fantastic photos (you can also comment on any and all images you - or other Pinterest members add).
This site is easy-as-pie to get the hang of, and let me tell you, highly (ridiculously) addictive!
I've already created more than 60 boards and have hundreds upon hundreds of pins (which you can see a sampling of in the screen shot above), all created in the span of about a month.
Now granted, I've mildly obsessed with Pinterest at the moment and won't usually be devoting anywhere near as much time as I did recently to it, but I definitely see this being a site that I'm going to use in the long run. It allows me to quickly create a virtual inspiration board that I can refer back to any time, use images I've pined for blog posts, and even turn into a wish list of sorts.
As you might expect, I've already started adding oodles of great vintage related images, which I’ve organized into different boards such as The Crazy Thirties, Fantastic Forties, Fabulous Fifties, Fantasy Vintage Wardrobe, Vintage home decor, Hollywood Past, and Vintage in a Modern World (amongst many others).
If you've not jumped on the Pinterest bandwagon yet, I highly recommend you do. It is a fabulous replacement (or supplement, as the case may be) for a host of bookmarking, wish list, and photo saving sites that quickly and easily allows you to corral all of the images and sites you find online and want to remember into one super handy-dandy spot.
For my Chronically Vintage readers who are already fellow Pinterest users, I'd love to see your boards and follow you there. You can find me (probably spending far too much time) on Pinterest under the username Vintage Blog (natch! :) ).
It's been a long time since a new communal website really captured my attention, but I can definitely say that Pinterest has and I couldn't be happier about it! 
Please feel free to pin anything you'd like from my posts here on Chronically Vintage. The more image sharing on Pinterest, the merrier!
