I completely dismissed Pinterest the first time I tried it at some point in 2011. “Nothing new here,” I thought to myself. It didn’t seem innovative enough (and a bit too girly) to be worthy of my interest.

It wasn’t until around the time Pinterest secured $27 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz, which valued the company at $200 million, that I realized Pinterest was onto something. Now, I didn’t start paying attention because of the crazy amounts of money that startups can raise or because of posts like this on on blogs like TechCrunch.

Nope. I started paying attention because I noticed my wife using Pinterest.

Actually, my wife and most of her girlfriends were spending what seemed like an absurd amount of time on Pinterest. It was as if Facebook had ceased to exist and the magazines they usually browsed were not current enough to deserve their attention.

So I gave Pinterest a second look.

I was skeptical. And sort of embarrassed.

I quickly realized two things. For starters, it was clear that there were a lot of women on Pinterest and most of them were using the site to motivate themselves through inspiring images, quotes and photos.

Secondly, I realized that most of my early adopter geeky friends were NOT on Pinterest. The usual suspects that tend to be first to sites like Pinterest were not there either. There were absolutely no signs of Robert Scoble and some of the most popular Pinterest users were people I had never heard of.

The things is that Pinterest wasn’t created for geeks and I don’t think the service is an attempt to change the world. Most Pinterest users have no idea what Delicious is, they have no interest in what TechCrunch has so say, and they are not concerned with whether Pinterest is a fad or not.

For Pinterest users, the service is like an eternal magazine that is also a real-time scrapbook. It is a simple, easy to use, intensely visual, and amazingly addicting experience. 

It might be a single feature in the eyes of people in the tech industry, but with almost 15 million Pinteresters pinning everything from their favorite places on Earth to infographics and memes, it is one truly killer feature.

I can’t fully explain why Pinterest has exploded in popularity, but my wife and I have put together a Slideshare presentation with 10 reasons why we think Pinterest users love it.

[Cross-posted at Social Nerdia]