Last week, we spotted what appeared to be a test of a personalized Pinterest homepage in the wild. At the time, the company declined to provide further comment on the matter, but today that changes: Pinterest is officially announcing a sneak preview of its new “Interests” page, designed to highlight items that match your own personal tastes.
With a tool Pinterest is simply calling “Interests,” the site will now help users find pins they like, based on the types of pins you’ve collected. As the company explains in the blog post announcing the news, if before you used to browse a “Gardening” section to find pins related to climbing plants and wall ferns, today your “Interests” page might feature vertical gardens instead.
As we noted before, what’s different about this section of Pinterest is not only the content, but also the look and feel, which is somewhat Flipboard-esque. Instead of uniformly sized pins, some items here are larger than others, likely indicating you’re doing more pinning around that particular topic.
The page will adapt to your interests over time, the company adds, noting that the more you use Pinterest, the better the page becomes.
Right now, the page is still just a preview, with various features and improvements in the works. It’s also only available on the desktop web, but will arrive to mobile and the Pinterest worldwide audience “soon,” the company says.
To try the new section, look for the “Preview! Explore Interests” link in the Pinterest category menu. (If you’re not seeing the link yet, stay tuned.) The company says that the interests section is only one of many personalization features in the works for 2014.
The company previously rolled out recommendations, and an ad product called Promoted Pins, which are also placed based on relevancy and interests, which indicate the overall direction it’s headed in terms of matching products (and advertisers) with users most likely to click and buy.