A power-pinner tries to convince a skeptic to start using the visual social network.

Pinterest, the “virtual pinboard” website where users post images of everything from iPod cozies to beautifully designed skylights, is the hottest social network of 2012. The site had more than 10 million unique users in January, and cultural commentators are scrambling to explain its epic appeal. Even though Pinterest is gaining users every day, it still confounds the nonpinning public. In this conversation, Slate Web designer and Pinterest enthusiast Holly Allen tries to explain the site’s charms to Slate senior editor and Pinterest skeptic Jessica Grose.

Jess: I’m a nonvisual person by nature, and no matter how many times I try to noodle around on Pinterest, I still don’t get it on a fundamental level—whenever I go to the site the main page just looks festooned with ribbons and everyone seems obsessed with nail art. Can you explain to me why I should be grabbing photos from around the Web and sticking them on a virtual pinboard?

Holly: I don’t get what’s not to get. I wonder if those of you who don’t get it aren’t aware of Pinterest’s two parts. Most people seem to know that you can pull up the site and search for things that other people have pinned, and also repin the things you like. But do you know about the part that lives in your browser? By adding the “pin it” button to your browser toolbar, you can use Pinterest to save anything that has an image—what to have for dinner, where to visit on vacation, cute haircuts, awesome infographics, books you want to read.

Say you’re looking for a new apartment and you see two things on Craigslist and four on random real estate sites. Instead of bookmarking six pages you can just click “pin it.” That action brings up all the images on whatever page you’re browsing, allowing you to click your favorite image, write up a little caption, and select which of your Pinterest boards to pin it to. Later, you can go to Pinterest and see all the pictures from your apartment hunt in one place. And the added value is that if you then click that picture, it brings you back to the original Web page with all the nitty-gritty info. See how this has legs?

Jess: I understand how it’s appealing to visual people, but if you prefer text to visuals—photos don’t jar your memory, they don’t excite your senses—how is it more helpful than just adding a regular old bookmark to a browser?

Holly: I think because the visual is a cue—it does jog your memory. You can see at a glance what lies behind the bookmark, if that makes sense. Say you and your husband wanted to renovate your bathroom, and you decided that you really wanted Carrera marble in there and he was on the fence. To prove to him that you were right, you could find a bunch of sites that said Carrera marble is the best thing ever. If you just bookmarked the pages you’d have to weed through a lot of stuff like this:

Marble Bathroom Floor Tiles | House & Home
bathrooms – décor pad
bathrooms - carrera marble luxurious bathroom carrera marble master bath
Installing the Carrera marble backsplash 247reno.

Now quick—tell me which of those bookmarks was the one that had the awesome clawfoot bathtub. You probably can’t. But if you’d used Pinterest, you could. Instead of generating a list of random words in a dropdown menu, Pinterest allows you to find that one at a glance. It’s a way to avoid a lot of, “No, wait. That’s not what I wanted to show you.”