Facebook had given users a “See First” option in July to let users determine what they want to see first from their Facebook “friends” rather than having to rely on Facebook algorithms. Or perhaps who to stalk, depending on the user and user intent that can always warp even the best of well-intended matters.

It’s a little harder to stalk on Pinterest given the lack of social bonding between most users with the way it’s used. People just follow others, in full or in part of select boards only. You have to make an effort to get to know somebody rather than just pictures of whatever they care about posted in your feed. There’s hardly any commenting done by most. You might as well be ordering pins related to themes, which you can rather than follow people, and have to put up with on the Picked for you feature Pinterest has. If they haven’t allowed an opt out to that, they should, but I’m here to talk about something else.

Given the massive number of pins people can get from following many others or many boards, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to identify which boards and/or people whose pins you want to see first when you open up your Pinterest feed?

You would be guaranteed you get to see what you identified you want to see the most each time you open up Pinterest. Whether you ultimately like it most that day or not doesn’t matter. You know you didn’t miss something from what you wanted to see most.

And how many times do you think a frequent user might have missed on what they liked most because they didn’t have the time to scroll through all their new pins to see what they wanted to see?

Sure, it might limit user time on the site that Pinterest would not like. However, given the improved user experience, I think they could get new users who abandoned it or didn’t want to go there due to the lack of organizational tools present. They get overwhelmed and don’t have the time to sort through things, or place them. It’d be like storage wars out of control, or having a hoarding addiction of sorts. Sometimes it’s the effort it takes to handle this that turns them off. A lot of times, it’s just a lack of time to find and get what they want.

Having a See First option would be a huge improvement to the Pinterest experience!

As for the question of intellectual copyright, perhaps, I don’t think it would be. Call it something slightly different like My Favourites, Must See, the Put in Show Room, Highlights, or whatever. Then build it like a filter, which it truly is. There are no copyrights on being able to filter content your own way. You do it in everything from email to Facebook to subscriptions online and other more material things in real life.

I hope Pinterest really goes for this See First option idea.

See some of my other Pinterest improvement suggestions, some of which they have done and some they still need to do. They probably did these suggestions on their own, not through following my suggestions, but we do think along the same lines! 🙂