This thing is about content saving and sharing and asked me to try out either Pinterest or Bitly. Since I've used Pinterest for awhile I decided to try Bitly to see what it is all about. I joined Bitly and tried saving a few websites. That part was easy enough. However, whenever I tried to share a link to Facebook I couldn't get it to work. I repeatedly gave Bitly access to my Facebook account, seemingly ok'ing whatever it wanted to do but it was always a no go. Obviously other people have been using it successfully for years but I decided it wasn't worth any more of my time. I can see the value of Bitly in the way you can organize your saved pages and especially in that it keeps track of how many clicks your shared links are getting. This could be extremely useful for if you were monitoring your library's facebook page etc. to see where your bitmarks go. That being said, I'll talk about Pinterest a bit.
I've used Pinterest only sparingly over the last year or so. Mostly because it is so visually interesting that one can easily fall down the rabbit hole and spend hours aimlessly wandering the net so I've purposely only used it sparingly. Mainly for gathering recipes and crochet patterns. It's really easy to save "pins" to boards that you create, or follow other boards. I'm planning on using it more extensively in the next couple of months to gather all sorts of picture ideas because we are going to add on a small addition so I'll need to get all sorts of idea of how I want it to look. This is where Pinterest really shines because other people will already have done all sorts of boards on "mudroom storage" or tile ideas for a back entry, etc. Anything you might want to research. So I can just search pinterest for their boards and then either "follow" them or repin their pictures to my boards. Of course, I can also do my own searching on the web and create my own boards from scratch. Then with smart phone or tablet in hand I can go to the tile shop or Home Depot and use these visual aids to help pick out supplies.
