Giselle Bisson Visibility Shift

Unless you’ve been under a rock you know the @Twitter IPO is soaring into the stratosphere right now — “from the Moon to Mars” says the Mercury News.

Yes, Twitter has triple digit growth — but no profit. Just like the good old days of the 1990s dot com boom.

It is very exciting for to watch the Twitter IPO soar to over $75 (now it’s settled down to $60).

But I’ll wait for the #Pinterest IPO–and the apps that will capitalize on that. Because Pinterest is the future of social media. Twitter is the past.

Watching the construction cranes and the building frenzy in San Francisco next to Twitter HQ and Silicon Valley where a boring little 3 bedroom house in Palo Alto just sold for $3.3 million  — we are officially seeing the beginning of “Web 3.0“ — the next Internet boom.

Web 3.0 is going to be the combination of mobile devices, touch screens, social media, big data, cloud applications and wearable computing. Some call this the “Internet of things.” It’s really the Internet of everything — music, commerce, shopping, maps, flight and hotel reservations, coupons, banking, film, literature, news — it’s all been replaced with a little device you can fit in your hand.

The new computer is a telephone — a touchscreen device built for two way communication with both voice and video with a GPS built into it.

And what is built from the ground up to take advantage of the mobile touch screen device with a video camera in it? Pinterest.

1. Pinterest is tactile. The other social networks all require a keyboard. Pinterest is made for touch screen devices. Facebook and Twitter are both stunted on a touchscreen interface and LinkedIn is almost impossible to use on a phone.

2. Pinterest is elegant, simple and MUCH easier to use–which is why women in particular love it. One third of all women in the US are on Pinterest now. That is a stunning statistic. And women do two things more than men — communicating and shopping.

3. Pinterest respects your privacy. (Facebook totally disrespects the privacy needs of its customers.) Twitter is somewhat more respectful, but it knows your phone number, and that’s not very private.

4. Pinterest encourages commerce. (It is still impossible to directly sell anything on Facebook–a huge missed revenue opportunity. Who sells stuff on Twitter?)

5. Pinterest is visual. When Facebook and Twitter started, the Internet and devices could not handle the rich media content they now are capable of. Twitter required special apps to use photos and just recently got photos that show up in the feeds.

6. Pinterest encourages ubiquitous sharing and search beyond your friend list. You can only share content to people you know in Facebook. You can only communicate with people who follow you on Twitter. LinkedIn is a totally closed network.

7. Pinterest is very searchable. (Even with Graph search, search still sucks in Facebook. It only works with #hashtags in Twitter)

8. Pinterest lets your content be shared to other social networks, blogs, websites. You can only do that in Facebook if you use an app. Twitter is somewhat more sharable, but really, it’s primitive compared to Pinterest.

9. Pinterest is creative, inspiring, positive and uplifting. Facebook … people get clinically depressed when they use it. Twitter…um, does it ever inspire you, emotionally? LinkedIn? Zzzzzzzz.

10. Pinterest recognizes and respects that your content is yours and ties it back to your website url. Forever, as a Pin is repinned, it virally drives people back to your site. Brilliant!  Facebook tries to “own” your content. Twitter can only point back at a url if you add the @ symbol as a courtesy. LinkedIn: Content? What content? We’re pretending to be professional here and afraid of anything creative or expressive.

11. Pinterest is built from the ground up to handle rich content and video–this is the future of social media.

The future of social media is television. As investor and film angel Sheridan Tatsuno of the Silicon Valley Global Network group on Facebook says:

“All social media bloggers and group admins are like TV network producers since social media already incorporates audio, video, photos, etc. Remember the million-channel Interactive Television that people talked about? We now have it. Soon, the advertisers and marketers will cherrypick the top social media producers and turn them into full-service Amazon-like lifestyle e-commerce sites. User attention is the scarcest resource so top social media creatives will be worth a fortune, sort of like rock stars and top athletes.”

I am already seeing the most engaged folks on my Facebook friend list getting TV shows and book deals. They are the ones who know how to get a conversation started and moderate it, kind of like a talk show host with a live, interactive audience. They know how to create moving content that gets shared. And they know how to monetize this audience with conferences, events, festivals. ebooks, products, consulting services or seminars that bring in revenue.

As we move into this next wave, it will be obvious why Pinterest is the future of social media.

I predict that someday, not far away, interacting in social media is going to be a lot more social — like talking at the front of a room, to an audience. We will do this with a device, like an iPhone, that recognizes speech. It will be mobile, and it will both send and receive video.

Basically, you will be live streaming, in two way conversation, to millions of people, who participate on their devices — kind of like a talk radio show, but it’s television, and it’s interactive. This will be the future of everything — music, learning, seminars, sermons, conferences, communication, film, theatre.

I know is sounds a little scary now — but it will not replace the live experience which will only become more valuable and prestigious.

It will continue to accelerate the information sharing and consciousness raising enabled by the Internet and free, ubiquitous shared social media.

We will still have live events, but these will be more like the live audiences that watch the Academy Awards or the the Tonight Show — much smaller than the televised audiences.

Which social network is most poised for the future of interactive media, at least today? Pinterest.

PS — there are rumors on the street that #Yahoo will buy Pinterest. It certainly fits in with Yahoo’s role as a content provider and media empire, rather than search engine.

Related articles

• 73% Of U.S. Adults Use Social Networks, Pinterest Passes Twitter In Popularity, Facebook Stays On Top (techcrunch.com)
• 3 Ways to Use Pinterest to Jumpstart Your Brand in 2014 (blogs.imediaconnection.com)
• Which Social Community Should You Build In? (benchmarkemail.com)
• How to Use Pinterest To Drive Traffic (benchmarkemail.com)
• Dear Writers: Are you using Pinterest? (nerdycanuck.wordpress.com)
• STUDY: More US Adults Use Pinterest Than Twitter (mukeshbalani.wordpress.com)
• Old on LinkedIn and rich on Pinterest: Do you fit your social media profile? (blogs.seattletimes.com)
• What’s Next in Social Media: 2013 Year in Review (problog.weddingwire.com)
• Twitter to buy Snapchat and Yahoo to buy Pinterest, Flipboard (mobile-ent.biz)
• Study: 1/3 of Women in U.S. Use Pinterest (mashable.com)