Technics: Internet: How Pinterest got mimicked by Pinspire (aka Pin Spire)

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1/22/2012 @ 2:49PM |4,584 views

"Parasite" Phenomenon - 

Radical Copycatting of 

Pinterest

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Many successful websites and apps spawn a cluster of imitators.
After Instagram caught fire, mobile apps with various effects
and filtering techniques flooded the Apple and Android markets.
Some of them are quite innovative and cool – particularly
PhotoForge 2 and Wordfoto. None came close to matching
the Instagram growth juggernaut.

But perhaps the most brazen – and amusing – case of radical
copycatting I have ever seen is the way Pinterest has been
mirrored by an aggressive “parasite” over the past two months.
Pinterest is perhaps the biggest web phenomenon of this winter.
The site hit 11 Million unique users during one December week
alone. Alexa now pegs it as the 32nd most popular website in
the United States. Visitors spend more than 11 minutes on the
site daily, crushing Twitter on this metric by more than 50%.

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Forbes (January22,2k12)

Tero Kuittinen, is a Forbes Contributor

He covers mobile hardware, software and gaming. 
Twitter: @teroterotero

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— Reposted here by Techknowlb

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 general editor, refWrite backpage

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Pinterest is pure catnip for mature women. Wedding tips, babies 

in funny poses, mason jar decoration ideas, cake recipes and 

exercise slogans drive the site. The runaway success of 

Pinterest probably demonstrates how much most mainstream 

websites cater to male visitors. 
There had been some kind of 

unmet demand for a site 
combining hair-braiding advice 
with hedgehog babies in rubber 
boots. Pinterest filled this 
vacuum 

highly effectively.

And as the highest 

form of flattery, 

Pinterest is now 

shadowed by one 

of the purest parasites ever. Something called 

Pinspire copies the look, feel and functionality of Pinterest almost perfectly.

There is even what seems to be a very carefully calibrated
guerrilla marketing campaign – many of the new Pinterest
posts are now followed by a polite, complimentary note:
“Absolutely adorable! Can I pin this on my board at
pin spire .com?” These notes flatter the original pinner,
while directing traffic to Pinspire. They appear to be crafted
to land just on the right side of the line defining raw spam.
The spelling of these notes recently changed from “pinspire”
to “pin spire”, indicating possible evasion from
countermeasures.

And they are driving healthy growth of Pinspire. Alexa now 
ranks Pinspire as roughly the number 13’000 site in America, 
up from being number 100’000 in early January. This matches 
the ranking of established, high-quality niche sites like Silicon 
Investor, Gamerankings or Calculated Risk – sites that took 
years to build and required vast amounts of content to claw their 
way to the middle.

Pinspire rocketed to this level in less than three months – and 
requiring little or no original design or content work. Judging 
from the latest wave of Pinspire redirect notes on Pinterest 
right now, the parasite just might stage another growth burst 
in coming months. The youth of Pinterest is probably what 
enables the parasitic competition – many consumers are only 
now discovering Pinterest and thus do not have much brand 
loyalty. It will be interesting to see where this saga is heading 
next.