Flavor of the month is such a cliché but I am hard to find words to describe the social startup phenomenon. For a good part of last year it was Quora. Now Quora turned to be academic. This year it’s the season of Pinterest. Or to reiterate, Pinterest is the flavor of the month, which has the potential to become flavor of the year. Everyone thinks that Pinterest is not Quora because ladies are on the floor for Pinterest.

The typical metamorphosis for a successful web service is to start as a beta, make some noise, gain some followers, make some more noise, release API (giving birth to aggregators) and make even more noise. Pinterest didn’t upset the metamorphosis. Thanks to the API, Pinterest has now led to a startup called Pinpuff. Pinpuff is an aggregator of sorts that calculates your Pinterest score.

How does Pinpuff work?

Pinpuff gives a score out of a possible 100 by calculating the number of followers, people you are following, boards, pins, likes and comments. It would even give you the monetary value of your Pinterest account. Simply put, it measures whatever can be measured to create a — mostly imaginary — value for your account.

What if Klout includes Pinterest in its score?

Klout, the aggregator of your social influence, has already included social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+. How hard would it be to include Pinterest in Klout’s grand scheme of things? Not very hard. What would Pinpuff do when Klout does what it does? That’s a very good question which Pinpuff should have already thought. If it hasn’t, then it should have considered whether a separate ranking for Pinterest is viable in the first place.

I guess every startup has two things in their mind when they startup: Make it large (like Facebook), or get acquired (like Tweetdeck). Pinpuff seems to be falling in the second category, eagerly waiting for its suitor. Klout is the obvious choice.

Via Penn Olson

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