In the past, when you clicked on a pin, you were taken to a new page to view that pin. To go back to where you were to continue browsing, you had to use the Back button. That landed you back at the top of what could be a very long page, forcing you to find your way back to where you were. Users who learned to shortcut-key a link to a new tab had it easier, but it was still a pain in the butt.

Now, Pinterest uses a lightbox-style feature (a la Google Images) that simply overlays a smaller window, fading the main window into the background temporarily. You can re-pin, comment, like, Tweet, get embed code, etc. from there. Once you are done, simply click off to the side to close the lightbox and return to exactly where you left off.

Pinterest has also made it easier to see where an item was originally pinned from, no matter how many generations of re-pin have happened before it made its way to you. This allows you to find the original pinner, which is a great way to make new connections with people who are actively on the lookout for new content to pin, as opposed to serial re-pinners (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

The new page allows you several new ways to look at your contacts and is a big improvement over the mostly static page that Flickr previously had used.

Now you can search for contacts within your contact list and sort your conatacts in various ways.

Some of the new features don’t work for me (I can’t sort my contacts by number of uploads for example), but this probably has more to do with my unusually large number of contacts on the site.

You can also now, for the first time, see who calls you a contact in an organized way. With this new view it also makes it easier to monitor reciprocal relationships on Flickr. I suspect that this new feature will result in a lot of people on Flickr being added into reciprocal contact relationships in the next few weeks or so.

It’s been interesting playing around with these pages this morning. I’ve already found some new people to add as contacts that I hadn’t been following before. It was also interesting for me to realize that I’ve been on Flickr for 44 months now and see who were the first contacts I ever added on the site. Turns out the first contact I ever added on Flickr was SeenyaRita.

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