Invade my privacy, please!

March 3, 2012 11:32 AM

I am very new to Pinterest. The friend who got me into it said that when she first signed up, it went through her email contacts looking for people with a Pinterest account. But it never did that (or offered to) when I signed up, and I want it to. Is there some way I can make it do this? (I searched Pinterest's Help section but couldn't find anything.)
posted by DestinationUnknown to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Go to your home page and click on your name at the top right corner. You'll get a drop down menu and the first item will be 'Invite Friends'. You choose the option of inviting friends via email or FB.
posted by sealee at 11:38 AM on March 3, 2012

Response by poster: sealee - that looks like it will just up and invite all my contacts, though, right? I only want to see if anyone I already know is on Pinterest so I can check out/follow them. I don't want to indiscriminately tell everyone I've ever had business dealings with to look at all the cute shoes I like.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 11:46 AM on March 3, 2012

Did you add your Facebook account? If so, then you can use "Find Friends" to follow those who are already on Pinterest, or invite people individually.
posted by ella wren at 12:11 PM on March 3, 2012

Response by poster: ella wren - I'm not on Facebook; I signed up using my Twitter account.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 12:45 PM on March 3, 2012

Best answer: I don't think you can scrape your own phonebook/friendlist without spamming people.
posted by rhizome at 1:22 PM on March 3, 2012

Best answer: I opened the Invite Friends tab a month or two ago and it gave me a list of friends who were on Pinterest who I had not yet added - like what you are talking about. I could select those that I wanted to add. Since then, every time I have checked, it only allows me to invite everyone. I thought it might give you a one-time-free list of friends like that... but more likely, Pinterest probably wised up and disabled that, forcing you to ask all your contacts.
posted by sealee at 3:01 PM on March 3, 2012

Response by poster: Pinterest probably wised up and disabled that, forcing you to ask all your contacts

Oh, you're probably right. That would explain why my friend could do it months ago but I can't do it now.
posted by DestinationUnknown at 3:10 PM on March 3, 2012

I just checked this a moment ago. From the Pinterest home page, I hovered over my name/picture in the upper right. Then I clicked on "find friends". I was taken to a page with two columns. On the left was a list of people that I could invite to Pinterest. It was apparently culled from facebook which I have connected to Pinterest. I could invite individually or collectively.

On the right was a list of people that I could follow. It was the subset of my facebook contacts who already had Pinterest accounts. I could follow them individually or collectively.

I hypothesized that this is related to the difference between facebook and twitter and not related to a change in Pinterest policy. To test my hypothesis, I connected my twitter account and the lists of people that I can invite or follow didn't change at all.

You friend must have connected his facebook account. Maybe twitter has a policy that prohibits Pinterest from doing this? That's surprising to me, but I can't think of any other explanations.
posted by stuart_s at 3:37 PM on March 3, 2012

The twitter/facebook difference might be on purpose - twitter followers/followees are different than facebook friends in some ways. Or at least most folks I know use twitter and facebook in different ways and have more non-overlapping networks than overlapping.
posted by clerestory at 4:52 PM on March 3, 2012