[tommorris]

Hey, Pinterest being cloned by Pinspire? Google "pinterest for porn". It's an easy enough model to clone. So is Flickr and Wikipedia (hey, they'll give you the software for free!) and lots of other sites, but it's hard to recreate the same passionate community.

I think the important value that Pinterest has is the community of pinners and their collective aggregated opinions. That community has the potential to actually be quite a useful testbed and market research mechanism (or even sales channel) for a lot of consumer brands. Maybe not $1.5bn worth of value, but there's quite a bit of space in the social web for more of a female-oriented, arts-and-craftsy, fashionable, aspirational type of site.

Go to your local magazine seller: there's a lot of women's oriented magazines, lifestyle oriented magazines... that's where I think the value in Pinterest is, as a sort of online complement to "aspirational lifestyle" brands.