Cautiously Optimistic

Friendsheet, a Facebook app that was released in January, got a big publicity boost this week when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg “liked” it on his Facebook Timeline.

Zuckerberg “likes” a lot of things, but with the eyes of the social media world constantly watching him, a stamp of approval such as this immediately gets noticed.

Mashable’s Brian Anthony Hernandez reported that one possible explanation of why this was noteworthy is that the app takes images from a person’s Facebook news feed and displays them in a way that is oddly reminiscent of Pinterest, the “it” social media network of 2012.

My only thought upon reading this was “what took them so long?” As the hot new social media network, the leadership team at Pinterest has to know they have a lovely red capital-P-shaped bulls-eye painted on their backs. Pinterest’s user base growth is phenomenal, prompting not only envy among the other big social media sites, but perhaps some reverse engineering to try and steal a little of its magic.

It’s obviously too soon to tell if Friendsheet will lead to mass defections from Pinterest’s user base, but the upstart social site has to know that the clock is ticking if it wants to grow “too big to be bought.”

Follow me on Twitter at @charlesprimm.