Pin Down The Pinterest Clones

Robin Wauters

Robin Wauters is the European Editor of tech blog The Next Web and lead editor of Virtualization.com. He was a senior staff writer at TechCrunch until his departure in February 2012. Aside from his professional blogging activities, he’s an entrepreneur, event organizer, occasional board adviser and angel investor but most importantly an all-round startup champion. Wauters lives and works in... → Learn More

Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
clone

Your website isn’t going anywhere until you get the cloning stamp of approval. We’ve seen it happen time and time again, but I continue to be struck by how utterly unoriginal cloners are when it comes to design or branding. Behold the German, Russian and Chinese carbon copies of Pinterest, the red hot startup that just raised $27 million for its ‘self-expression engine’. Can you spot the differences between Pinterest, Pinspire.de (from master cloners the Samwer brothers), Fast Lane Ventures-backed Pinme.ru and China’s Markpic?

An honorable mention goes to Myspace – we should recognize that they were definitely the pioneering Pinterest cloner. The other are basically me-too Pinterest ripoffs.





Company: Pinterest
Website: pinterest.com
Launch Date: 2009
Funding: $338M

Pinterest is a social networking site with a visually-pleasing “virtual pinboard” interface. Users collect photos and link to products they love, creating their own pinboards and following the pinboards of other people whom they find interesting. The site has experienced rapid growth in recent months.

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