Highlights from the article:

While Pinterest is more than just images, image is still everything. This plays into the fact that the web has become so much more visual.

"Nobody wants to read anymore," said Josh Crandall, principal analyst at Netpop Research.

"Pinterest does a great job capitalizing on the ease of sharing pictures and categorizing interests on the Web," he pointed out. "As Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) has proven, brands that associate with fashion, high design, and function succeed in the marketplace. Pinterest offers advertisers the opportunity to participate, and even encourage users to collaborate in image advertising."

Pinterest could expand beyond social networking and give the current search giants some competition.

"Companies vying for a share of users' attention, like Facebook and Google+, or image search, like Bing and Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), will be concerned with the rapid growth of Pinterest," Crandall told the E-Commerce Times. "They are creating a destination that gets more interesting and time-consuming by the moment. It's a valuable database that users will think about first for images on the Web."

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