How Pinterest Will Transform the Web in 2012: Social Content Curation As The Next Big Thing
The most interesting wave hitting the social web in 2012 is social curation. This was kicked off in 2011 as Pinterest's growth was noticed by Silicon Valley and a number of companies quickly followed suit …
Context & Ripple Effects
Curation-as-product predates Pinterest's breakout: tools like Curated.By were already pitching 'bundling the whole Web' back in late 2010, before anyone had settled on a winning format for it. What changed through 2011 was that Pinterest found that format — image-first boards — and its growth curve got Silicon Valley's attention.
This piece, from Elad Gil at the start of January 2012, is the thesis-setting moment: it names social content curation as the year's defining wave and observes that a number of companies are already rushing to follow Pinterest's lead. The question it frames — whether curation is a feature or a platform-scale shift — is the one every social product team was about to have to answer.
First-order effects
- Pinterest enters 2012 with confirmed momentum and a swarm of direct imitators copying its board-and-pin mechanics, forcing it to differentiate on network effects rather than features.
- Startups building curation clones face an immediate bar-raising problem: the template is now public, so execution speed and community density, not the concept, decide who survives.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and e-commerce sites watch their traffic mix shift as image-led pinning becomes a discovery channel alongside search and Facebook sharing, changing where they invest in shareable visual assets.
- Incumbent social platforms must decide whether to bolt on curation features or treat Pinterest as a separate graph they cannot easily absorb — a build-versus-ignore call with real product-roadmap cost.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the web adds a durable curation layer between creators and audiences, with a small number of platforms owning the aggregation point and everyone else optimizing to be pinned.
- That consolidation of discovery into curated feeds sets up the next round of platform-power questions — distribution gatekeeping, referral dependence, and eventual regulatory scrutiny of whoever wins the layer.
The trend: The social web is growing a curation layer on top of publishing, with Pinterest's 2011 growth establishing the template that competitors and platforms alike now scramble to absorb.