Last January, the social photo and content-sharing website Pinterest began rolling out its new look to a limited number of beta testers. The new look puts content discovery at the forefront by making the pins larger and activity feed smaller.

Sound familiar? It should. Facebook (News - Alert) had a similar announcement during its March conference earlier this month where the company announced that videos and photographs would get a much larger display in a person's news feed. In his announcement, Mark Zuckerberg (News - Alert) specifically noted Pinterest as the kind of information people may wish to highlight as they cross-post to various social platforms.

So what's new with Pinterest's new website design, which is gradually being made available to the general public starting today?

The most noticeable change is that pins are bigger. The borders around the pins have shrunk, so each image displays slightly larger. Clicking on a pin provides a high-resolution picture without having to visit the source of the link. When viewing an individual pin, users can at a glance browse an entire collection of other pins on the same board, without ever having to leave the page.

When you are looking at a pin from a website, Pinterest will now display more pins from that particular site, helping websites gain more traffic while letting users discover new content. Also, looking at a pin will now show you other users who have pinned the same pin, increasing the sense of community by encouraging users to become “Pin Pals” with each other.

The folks at Pinterest have also gone ahead and made some important changes to the back end of the website, which should make it more reliable and stable for visitors. One of the new features is anchored browsing, so that hitting the “back” button ensures a user will be taken to the place they initially were in the main stream. 

In a company blog post, Pinterest lead product designer Jason Wilson said that the company wanted to make things simpler and cleaner, without requiring users to learn anything new.

“What you'll find are some subtle but useful changes, like bigger pins, so you see more of what you love,” wrote Wilson.

The company began sending out e-mail invitations today, so be sure to keep an eye on your inbox.