Speaking at the South by Southwest conference, Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann (who, judging by photos, is no more than 14 years old) says there are newly redesigned profile pages going live to the site later this week. Along with it, new things to “pin” and a new app.
Silbermann emphasized new discoverability features in the redesign, saying he and his team wanted to make it easier for users to stumble upon other like-minded users, and highlight the people their connections are repinning images from.
He also said the team is working on expanding the number of things users can pin, including video. Soon, people will be able to pin from Vimeo, Hulu and Netflix, among others. And, as was revealed earlier this week,an iPad app — as well as a public API — are also in the works.
Silbermann specifically mentioned wanting the profile pages to look different than what Facebook is doing. That’s a smart move given the need to differentiate and given how grumpy a lot of people still are about being migrated to the Facebook Timeline feature.
But there’s a lot on the line for Pinterest here. It’s experiencing meteoric growth, deep user love, and, thus far, none of the grousing from users that Facebook always gets. A redesign, however, is always risky because you’re changing something that people have gotten used to and, even if it truly is better, people might complain.
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