There is very little doubt that social media websites are only gaining popularity these days. Of course, there have also been a ton of social networking sites over the last few years that have tried to compete with the big boys. Facebook (News - Alert) and Twitter are currently the undisputed kings of the social networking world with Google+ following behind. 

While Facebook is often looked at as the only alternative for people to really spend their time and energy, there are others who don’t trust the site. Still others are realizing they might be spending a little too much time on Facebook.

While Facebook is still ultra popular, there might be room in the social networking world for one more site if it offers something different. So far, Pinterest is looking like it could be just the site that will eat into Facebook’s dominance thanks to a different approach to the whole thing. This different approach seems to be working at least in the beginning as the site has seen an explosion in popularity.

Of course some of the popularity is simply because this is the new site. When Google (News - Alert)+ officially launched there was quite a hubbub about the site for the first few weeks. Now there are some devoted Google followers who still use the site over and over but the interest in the site has definitely diminished over the last few months. Whether or not that will eventually happen to Pinterest, that particular social networking site has certainly taken off since its launch.

In December, the new social networking site had a very respectable 7.5 million unique visitors. In January, that number increased to 11.7 million unique visitors and a recent comScore report shows that visitors to the site exploded again in February up to 17.8 million visitors. 

Of course this means that the amount of visitors more than doubled from December to February. That rate of growth puts Pinterest as the third fastest increase in traffic in all websites over that period of time. Only the IRS home page and a site called Healthline saw a steeper increase.