Pinterest is on of the most popular, fastest-growing sites on the Internet today. Thousands of people every week are flocking to the site. But, there is not real “killer app” attached to Pinterest yet to really monetize it or take advantage of its huge follower base.

That all may be changing soon, though. Pinterest is releasing an API, and venture capitalists are lining up around the block to throw money at some developer team that might be able to do for Pinterest what Zynga did with Facebook.

Once an API is released, developers will start working in earnest to take concepts already on drawing boards and see how much they can implement them into Pinterest‘s design.

Pinterest has already shown itself capable of driving impressive traffic to retail sites. And, they are already using SkimLinks to take advantage of some of that traffic in the form of affiliate links. No word on how much they are converting and making off that effort yet, but the traffic is there.