I've been watching pintrest with some interest recently. It's not a story of great relevance here, but I basically built pintrest in 2007 - 2008, and then neve

I've been watching pintrest with some interest recently. It's not a story of great relevance here, but I basically built pintrest in 2007 - 2008, and then never launched it. It was pretty much the exact same site; right down to the infinite scrolling, and concept of cards and images. I did not have the concept of 'repinning' they have though, I opted for 'loving' something, and copied the hackernews model of moving things around. My concept was 'what's cool right now'; it was to be a large visual endless board of interesting visual things and products in the real world. When I researched how I should categorise, I arrived at almost exactly the same categories pintrest now has (90% overlap). I put those categories together by the same method I can only presume pintrest did; by highest advertising CPC rates and revenue driving metrics. I guess the slight deviation is because I was working on 2007 figures. When I came up with the concept, it was when digg was king, and reddit was still highly techie. I used to browse this site every single day; http://www.notcot.org http://www.notcot.org - and noticed there was huge gap in community driven linking based towards images and products. They didn't work well with text links. Anyway, after initially planning simply to advertise for revenue (I made my image columns the same size as a standard advert banner) I arrived at the same conclusion; The only real way to make a solid stream of revenue from this is to create some kind of way to tap into the revenue created from the 'products' linked to. I stumbled and stuttered on how to implement this. I couldn't figure out how to blend the concept of products in without trashing it. Then I got caught up in implementing new features when things like facebook connect were announced, and then, due to unfortunate personal events, never got around to finishing the last 5% and going live, it just sat on a staging server for years. Something clicked for me recently when I saw was fab.com are doing. I realise with hindsight that had I simply launched when I had a basic product I could have come to these challenges later; which is exactly what pinterest will be in the process of doing now; but it's not an easy problem to crack. Makes me happy to see pintrest doing well. I'm not in the valley, and I never really had any grand plans, obviously they had the vision I didn't! I doubt I'd have gotten much beyond a few hundred visitors haha :) For anyone interested; http://i.imgur.com/eEJva.jpg http://i.imgur.com/eEJva.jpg It's not as pretty as pintreset, I was keeping comments on the permalink and cropping image but it was an early beta.