Pinterest Lens is Available to all in the US…and is Kind of Cool!

It might not attract as much attention as Facebook, Snapchat and Twitter, but Pinterest is a social network that has been chugging along at its own speed, building up a dedicated community, with its concept of sharing “pins” that contain interesting information. And unlike some other social networks, those at Pinterest have managed to keep innovating without fiddling too much with the core strength of the app, which is a clean graphics oriented interface that works briskly.

The latest innovation brought by the app is something it calls Lens. Still in beta, it has today been made available to iOS and Android users in the US. And well, it is fascinating. The Lens is a sort of “search by image” concept. You open the app, go to search, and instead of typing in your search query, you choose the camera icon next to the search textbox. This results in a circle appearing in the middle of your display, showing what the camera sees. Select the object you want to search for – food, a book, clothes, whatever – and tap the circle once. Pinterest will then try to identify the object you have snapped and also serve up pins and topics related to it that you can search on the social network. Sort of like Amazon’s app, which lets you take a picture of an object and then get its price on the “Everything Store.”