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Pingram combines the best of both worlds

Italian developer Gennaro Varriale tells us about his popular mash-up of image-sharing social networks. 

 

Lauren Rae Orsini

Internet Culture

Posted on Mar 5, 2012   Updated on Jun 2, 2021, 8:33 pm CDT

Just putting Pinterest and Instagram in the same sentence is good for search engine optimization. Imagine the hype potential of an entire site dedicated to uniting the two networks in one.

Pingram is a startup aiming to do just that. The social network allows users to upload their own Instagram photos to a Pinterest-style bulletin board.

The network is the weekend project of Italian developer Gennaro Varriale, who wrote on Twitter that he only spent seven hours building Pingram. The site launched on Feb. 13.

“I created Pingram in a weekend in order to relax between projects for customers,” he told the Daily Dot. “What a beautiful way to relax, isn’t it?”

Since then, Varriale said the network is taking off.

“Only yesterday I got 1000 new pingrammers,” he told us.

In order to join Pingram, users must already have Instagram accounts. The network will ask you to log into Instagram and grant permission to Pingram as a third-party app. After that, all your existing Instagram photos, along with their likes and comments, will be added to Pingram.

Even if your Instagram contacts aren’t on Pingram, they will still show up on your feed. Pingram’s feed tool allows users to see their Instagram feeds in Pinterest’s endless scrolling format.

However, your contacts must be Pingram users if you want to repin their photos. Otherwise, you can only pin your own photos, a limitation that neatly avoids Pinterest’s current copyright woes.

In the next few weeks, Varriale said he’ll be working on giving Pingram a cleaner interface and adding Facebook Timeline integration.

Pinterest, Instagram, and now Facebook? Soon all our favorites will be in one place.

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*First Published: Mar 5, 2012, 3:10 pm CST