Pinterest, a social networking site, has agreed to acquire Punchfork. Punchfork, a cooking social network which displays a similar set-up and look as Pinterest, was founded in May 2010, but didn’t officially launch until January 2011.
Punchfork also acts a lot like Pinterest in the sense that it gives its users new, exciting, and creative ideas. Rather than having general posts, Punchfork focuses its thought on fun cooking recipes for individuals and families.
Punchfork uses conversations on other social media sites to provide its customers with quality recipes. It combines recipes from other social networking sites, like Simply Recipes, The Pioneer Woman, Leite’s Culinaria, Bon Appetit, 101 Cookbooks and Picky Palate, and brings them to its users.
Image via http://punchfork.com/
Although the company is relatively new, Punchfork has built itself a decent audience. Its Facebook (News - Alert) page currently has over 81,000 likes, and according to Compete.com, it averages around 100,000 unique visitors each month. Pinterest hopes to grow the cooking and recipes idea onto its 27 million unique visitors each month.
“We believe that a unified destination benefits our users in the long run, and the Punchfork team will focus on contributing to Pinterest as the premier platform for discovering and sharing new recipes and other interests on the web,” said Jim Miller, CEO of Punchfork.
Punchfork uses the social data it collect,s like tweets, and records which recipes garner the most attention. It also uses a rating system where users can score the recipe anywhere from 0-100. Punchfork then takes its most popular recipes and puts them into a visually appealing layout. Users are also given real time posts from different food blogs and recipe sites.
For the time being, Punchfork will continue to work as its own entity and provide support, but eventually it will be retiring its website, mobile apps and API, in hopes to successfully integrate its audience with that of Pinterest.
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