pinerly – my concerns with UPDATE

Pinterest’s success has created an out of control bandwagon.

Jump on board!

There is internet traffic for all!

In real life, any investigation ends with the money trail.  In internet life, any investigation ends with the traffic trail.

Where there is traffic, there is the hope of money.

One of the first to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon is Pinerly.  They started with a social media push about how you would be able to schedule pins like bloggers currently schedule posts, tweets and FB interactions.

This is a big deal.  I want to be able to schedule pins.  There are times of day that are better for pinning.  It would enable me to spread my pins out.  Despite how it looks, I am NOT on the internet all day, but through the magic of scheduling it may appear like I am.

Back to Pinerly.  They floated the pin scheduling rumor out there and had thousands of bloggers sign up.  Not only sign up, but they were requiring that you refer at least 5 of your friends to get a Beta invitation.

Ick.  I didn’t end up doing that. I signed up without referring friends and still do not have an invitation.

Weeks later, Pinerly has invited the chosen and encouraged pinning through their service.  From what I hear, scheduling pins is still something that is “coming soon”.

If that was the end of the story, this post would never have been written.

Unfortunately, that is NOT the end of the story…

Pinerly is sourcing YOUR blog posts as their own.

Through Pinterest, the post that is pinned is sourced to the blog where it was published.  Here is an example:

This is one of my latest blog posts that I pinned to one of my Pinterest recipe boards.  As you can see in this screenshot that it shows that I pinned it 6 days ago from junecleavernirvana.com.

Now let’s look at a pin that was pinned through Pinerly:

What?

My good friend Laurie provided this screenshot of a pin that she did through Pinerly to her Pinterest Mother’s Day board.  I can PROMISE you that Pinerly did NOT write this post about Mother’s Day Paper Tulips.  In fact, Ginger Snap Crafts wrote it and should get credit for it.

Pinerly is not only messing with the credit of a post, but it is ruining one of my FAVORITE parts about Pinterest.  As a Pinterest user, I love finding something amazing and then looking at the “more from…” section beneath the pin.  It only makes sense that if I fall in love with one thing, I will likely fall in love with some of the other posts written by the same author.

Here is an example of what normally happens through Pinterest:

So, let’s say you liked the pin of my wacky motherhood story and were in the mood for another one.  You could simply click on another picture {I suspect the one on the far right side would be similar} and get what you are looking for.

This is what Pinerly is doing:

So, let’s say you liked the pin from Alissa Marquess of her Dealing with Criticism of Your Parenting Style article at Creative with Kids {thanks Alissa for providing this screenshot}.  You liked Alissa’s post and want to find what other Pinners liked that she wrote.  You look down for more and find that Pinerly is the source.  You click on all the pretty pictures and surprisingly, NONE of them have positive parenting advice you seek.

In fact all the other articles from Pinerly are pretty RANDOM because they didn’t write ANY of them.

Hey Pinerly!  If I wrote it, I want credit for it.  I promise to give you credit for what you write.

UPDATE:  I got a tweet tonight (4/11/12) with the following information:

From what I understand, Pinerly users can now OPT OUT of tracking their clicks in order to allow the source to reflect the actual source.

Yay!

Those of you who have been following this closely, have seen that Pinerly has also responded in the comments.  They also emailed me directly this week as well.  I appreciate that they have taken this issue seriously.

Holly

Tagged as: blogging