Share a Pinterest pin with someone not on Pinterest?

Another member of the Pinterest crowd. Yes, I completely understand, I too am on Pinterest — find me on Pinterest — and find it to be quite engaging most of the time. Occasionally I’ll just see dozens of photos about hair braiding or nail painting, but usually it’s a bit more varied than that, and it might also reflect that I need to find more guys to follow on the site too. 🙂

As with most social networks, however, Pinterest really is designed so that it’s a self-contained universe. The buzzphrase for this is a “walled garden”, but I think they must have been getting some complaints about customers because in the last week or so a new feature “share” has shown up on Pinterest and part of what it lets you do is, you guessed it, share specific pins with people via email, people who aren’t part of the Pinterest community.

To demonstrate, I’m going to start with a cartoon I found amusing, tied to my interest in zombies.

Yes, “Pinterest” and “zombie” in the same article. Ain’t the Internet lovely?

So here’s the pin image:

See? Isn’t that funny? It’s a zombie smoothie. And yes, now you can just imagine the weird searches that’ll drop people onto this page. 🙂

Anyway, back to topic. Move the cursor over the image and new buttons show up:

The “Send” button is new. Let’s have a look at what happens when you click on it:

If you want to share it with someone else on Pinterest, just start typing in their name and your options will appear.

Before I show you that, though, there’s a trick to using this feature! Click on the tiny little “speech balloon” on the top right and you’ll find that you can add a comment, which is very useful:

But what happens if you start typing in a name in the “Type a name to search” box?

This:

If I pick the first match, “Ashley Taylor”, then it’s a simple click and away it goes…

What if I entered an email address instead?

First mistake: you can’t “enter” an email address. That input box is just for searching Pinterest users. (Yeah, I did that my first time out too). Instead, you need to click on the “send to an email address” link, which opens up yet another window:

Ah, now you can see that it’s not a single image, but a strip of images!

In any case, you know the drill from this point. Type in your Mom’s name and email address, add a message if you’d like and click on “Email Pin”.

Here’s what happens:

And if you’re curious about what your Mom’ll receive in her inbox, here’s what happened when I emailed this particular zombie brain smoothie pin to myself:

Now you know. Your Mom will still end up popping onto Pinterest to see the content, but it’s still pretty easy for you to share now…