Turn Facebook Into Pinterest With This New App

Pinterest, the newest social network to take the world by storm, is coming to Facebook in a unique iteration: an app that redesigns your News Feed, Timeline, friend list and multimedia pages to look like Pinterest’s home page.

Pinview’s app is one of Facebook’s newest apps for Timeline, and resides within the Facebook browser. This means that you can toggle between your normal views of Facebook and Pinview’s Pinterest-esque design without having to disable an app or remove an add-on like you might have had to do in the past.

When you download the app, it requests access to certain parts of your account, such as your friend lists and your News Feed. While providing these privileges is necessary for the app to work, you can revoke its capability to post on your Timeline, as well as change the privacy of who can see posts Pinview makes on your Timeline by switching the privacy setting from Friends to Only Me.

The Pinview app is pretty neat. The buttons in the top nav bar switch the view from “The Pinview” (i.e. your News Feed) to your profile, your friends, recent photos and new video.

You can use Facebook as you typically would from within any of these views, too. You can comment on, share or like a friend’s post, photo or video by clicking on the image thumbnail—which enlarges the image and displays Likes and comments like you’d see on Pinterest—and selecting the appropriate button.

You can also browse your friends’ profiles while in Pinterest -mode by clicking on their profile photo from within the Friends view. While you can’t post something directly to their Timeline, you can comment on a status update, photo or video from this mode.

Personally, there are a few things I don’t like about Facebook’s Timeline design. In particular, I don’t like how little information you can consume without scrolling for miles. The Pinview app alleviates this, though you do lose the sense of chronology in posts.

Pinview is a unique way of viewing Facebook content without the distractions of the Ticker, alerts, Chat, messages and other apps. I don’t think I’ll trade the normal Facebook view for Pinview anytime soon, but it is a refreshing option.