Serendipity35

Facebook moves towards being more than just your social graph center, Pinterest wants to be more than a image social-sharing site. More Google than Facebook, even though Facebook seems to want to be Google sometimes.

Pinterest has more than 100 million users and was the early leader in having people share images and tag and categorize them for others to find.

But what if you see something you're interested in on Pinterest, but you don’t know how to find it in real life, or you don't even what that item is called. Examples that Pinterest gives on their blog are that "perfect lamp hiding in a Pin of someone’s living room, or maybe a random street style shot with the exact shoes you’re looking for."

Unlike Facebook's similar technology, Pinterest is not looking to recognize people/faces. This is all about things.

If you see something in a Pin that you want to learn more about, you tap the search tool in the corner, select the part you’re interested in and it will go to other Pins just like it.

The obvious monetizing aspect to this is to allow you to zoom in on that lamp, find out its name and where you can buy it. 

Pinterest's fledgling visual search engine (it calls it “a discovery engine”) pushes us further towards the our visual interactions with devices and perhaps with the world. 

I do like that Michael Lopp, Pinterest’s head of engineering, has said that “This is building serendipity,” 

For the near future, I would expect this new feature to help Pinterest sell advertising via the 50 billion images/pins on the site. They have only indexed about a billion of those images so far. 

But what else might this technology be used for? Does it have educational applications?