Pinterest just announced the launch of the Developers Platform, a suite of APIs for building apps and integrations that “bring pins to life,” as the company puts it.
“This is the first time we’re opening up API access for the development of consumer apps,” a spokesperson for Pinterest told WebProNews in an email. “We’re starting with a beta program where developers in the U.S. can sign up for API access.”
“The Platform will enable developers to tap into the Pinterest interest graph of more than 50 billion projects, places and products to build and grow their apps,” they said. “With the new APIs, developers will be able to reach millions of Pinners with apps that make Pins actionable and help people take their ideas offline.
“We expect to see a range of apps, including those that re-imagine the education, transportation and vacation planning industries, and more,” the spokesperson said. “Imagine an app for ordering ingredients from a recipe Pin or booking trips based on travel Pins.”
You can sign up for beta access to the platform here. You can also get a preview of the API and a look at all the available endpoints. The API is RESTful, uses JSON over HTTPS and lets you authenticate users with OAuth 2.0.
Developers can build apps or integrations that access an authorized user’s pins, boards, followers, and the boards, users, and interests they follow. They can read a board’s pins, create/update/delete an authorized user’s boards, get pin details, and create/update/delete an authorized user’s pins.
It will be quite interesting to see what developers build with all of this. Pinterest is still a relatively new frontier for businesses, and recently added features are only making it a potentially more effective for reaching customers. Things like guided search and promoted pins are opening up new opportunities that weren’t there in the visual social network’s early days, and that’s not to mention the rumored “buy” button.
Pinterest turned five years old in March, and revealed that 50 billion pins had been collected by people on over a billion boards. 80% of its traffic comes from mobile, and about 2/3 of its pins come from business websites. Every day nearly 2 million people pin product rich pins, and more than 14 million articles are pinned.
The platform news follows last week’s announcement of the new Pinterest Marketing Developer Partners program, which aims to help businesses get more value out of their Pinterest efforts by helping marketing solution providers tap into the company’s content publishing and ads APIs. That’s made up of a limited group of partners including Ahalogy, Buffer, Curalate, Expion, Newscred, Percolate, Shoutlet, Spredfast, Sprinklr and Tailwind. Presumably that will expand in time.
Image via Pinterest
