Karl Badde

One thing is certain processes are becoming much more accelerated and everything concept and design has to support one goal: to get the right requirements as soon and as cheap as possible into the product.

It’s a refreshing sensibility in a digital world overwhelmed with toxic externalities. While they can certainly still develop, it seems that present day Pinterest has no negative externalities. People actually feel better after a session on Pinterest, company executives have told me. On those other platforms? Not so much.

Pinterest is maddeningly hard to get your head around if you’ve spent as much time as I have thinking about search and social. But the light went off when I started to think about its scale (200 million+ users) and the aggregate data those users create every day. Pinterest calls part of this data the “taste graph,” a concept that perhaps failed to capture the world’s imagination as yet, given all the graphs that have preceded it (Twitter’s interest graph, Facebook’s social graph, etc). But the taste graph is a powerful ally if your core business is helping people discover actionable ideas — ideas they can go do. Pinterest drives its business by that one metric — does the service help people get things done? Last year it implemented a “Tried It” button that has become a much loved feature of the site. And …