Pinterest? What's the point?

Pinterest is a trending website, but really what is the point?  At first glance, Pinterest is confusing and loaded full of cupcake images.  Knowing why and how Pinterest is used can help sort through the messiness of the splash page.

People use Pinterest to get inspiration for their hobbies, create wishlists, and organize ideas.  They organize their ideas onto pinboards, most of which can be publicly viewed.  These pins can be either linked from individual websites or uploaded from the computer.

Source: enguage.com

The primary function of Pinterest is curative, uploading images without proper attribution is counter-intuitive.  Also, the back link provided by pinning from a site, helps the original site increase its SERP rating.   Pins are indexed by search engines and are fully searchable, The problem comes in the description.  Most people do not accurately describe the pins or make use of the full 500 character limit.

iPhone alerts

iPhone alerts are supposed to help keep you productive, though most are pretty annoying and can keep you from working...

Source: Green Data Center Conference

The most annoying of the alerts is the very basic alert.  It is a pop-up window which must be poked before you can do anything else on your phone.  It will interrupt your game of angry birds to inform you that you haven't played your word game lately...

Banners are a quick notification on the top of the screen that only lasts a few seconds.  Banners can also be set to appear on the lock screen, which when swiped will open to the app that sent the event.  Banners wont interrupt you and don't require you to do anything before they go away.

The badge is the passive aggressive alert.  It is the little re dot that sits on the corner of your app and lists how many notifications are associated with it.  It can also be a bit of a nag, that little red dot can just be there to say you haven't checked in in a while like on the Starbucks app or on words with friends.

The notification center is the summary page of most notifications.  It can be accessed by pulling down from the top of the screen while the phone is unlocked.  My favorite part is that the notifications that are listed on that page when swiped open directly into the app sending them.  You can also post to facebook and your twitter feed.