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  As a result of my recent engagement, I've been thinking of ways we might leverage some of the technology and software that I drone on about incessantly (Seriously got lucky with that "Yes!" folks) to help in the planning and execution of our wedding.  You know, without making it worse. 

 

My first thought was to find a tool with which the various parties involved [insert sincere genuflection to the fiance, her mother, my mother, her sister, her best friend, my sister, the Queen of Timbuktoo here] might share and even comment on the things they find on the internet that might even be tangentally related to a wedding.   

 

About a week or two ago the world discovered Pinterest, a pinboard and internet sharing site the likes of which have been around since the dawn of the internet.  It's hard to say what has suddenly made Pinterest so popular when similar services such as Pinboard and Amplify never really seemed to gather the crowds of adoring facebook fans that Pinterest has, but perhaps it's simply that they so closely integrated their sharing service with facebook that the mob that is the facebook set has pushed them into that critical mass territory in which a social network becomes 'too big to fail'.  So, off to Pinterest I go thinking to myself, "All too easy!"

 

But like any Ugnaught designed carbon-freezing chamber, Pinterest has a major flaw.  Everything you share on Pinterest is public, in the most public sense of the word.  While that makes it an excellent way to re-broadcast bits and pieces of the internet to the internet at large in a manner that is easier than, say, running your own blog, it makes pinterest a pretty shabby internet tool.  And if the internet is about anything, it's about tools.

 

Looking for something that had the "clip'n'pin" functionality of Pinterest but also granular control over who gets to see the things I clip, I stumbled upon Clipboard.  Clipboard is, in many ways, exactly like Pinterest.  It lets you clip the internet up into little pieces and share them in about a billion different ways.  It also lets you clip things and keep them private, or share them on a user by user basis, in a "tagging" fashion that users of Twitter will immediately recognize.  So if the Lovely & Talented Liz see's a picture of a dress she likes, she can clip it and save it with all of those people whose opinion on dresses she might trust.  If a little further on in her browsing she comes across a an article entitled, "How to Keep Your Best Man from Embarassing You at Your Wedding!" she might clip that and share it exclusively with me.  Clipboard also lets you #hastag individual clippings, allowing you to create categories that you can sort through later.  

 

Emboldened by my success, I move on to find other ways I might insert my geeky side into the wedding planning process.  Stay tuned as I stoop to conquer the world of wedding website development...

     

Update on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 8:05PM by Ryan Hindinger

Clipboard is still requiring invites from existing users, so if you'd like to give Clipboard a spin, let me know.