CNET

[Pinterest co-founder Ben] Silbermann suggests that collecting online is a form of self-expression for people who don’t create. “If you walk around Brooklyn and ask people how they express themselves,” he said in a speech at New York University, “everyone’s a musician or an artist or a filmmaker. But most of us aren’t that interesting. Most of us are just consumers of that. And when we collect things and when we share those collections with people, that’s how we show who we are in the world.”
Not everyone buys into this, of course. Here’s The Awl’s co-editor, Choire Sicha, for instance, on the subject of rebloggers who fancy themselves curators: “As a former actual curator, of like, actual art and whatnot, I think I’m fairly well positioned to say that you folks with your blog and your Tumblr and your whatever are not actually engaged in a practice of curation. Call it what you like: aggregating? Blogging? Choosing? Copyright infringing sometimes? But it’s not actually curation, or anything like it… .” To which a commenter added: “My Tumblr isn’t so much curated space as it is a symptom of deeper pathologies made manifest.

Still, it feels like the magic that helped create Gmail, Chrome, News, Translate, and Docs has vanished in the Google+ void. I fear that Google has become obsessed with chasing Facebook’s success, when its resources would be better spent developing and launching bolder innovations that actually change the way we use the Web.

That magic is what made Google into one of the world’s greatest companies. Without it, Google’s just another stodgy company trying to protect its weakening empire.

In an ironic way, Long says, this frees many people to be more public about who they really are and who they want to be, because it’s less focused on the kind of personal content that sets off privacy and security alarms. “Pinterest is a place where we can demonstrate: ‘If it weren’t for all those mundane things that I do that I post on Facebook, this is what I would be doing and consuming. Here is my real self,’” he explains.