THINGLE: Wikipedia meets Pinterest!

thingle.com

First there was Pinterest, then there was Gentlemint and the battle of social photo sharing began (see: Pinterest vs Gentlemint). But now a new site has entered the arena! Thingle.com is being sold as “Wikipedia meets Pinterest”, and it was launched earlier this year. The site was created by the Zurich-Swiss/New York start-up Thingle with an aim to create “the most exciting and useful social web platform on the web”. However, this is a rather bold ambition that would involve overthrowing the mighty Facebook and Twitter. 

A Thingle

So what’s Thingle? At first glance its basically Pinterest! Thingle lets you organise and share images and videos representing things that you are passionate about. Sound familiar? Once a user has created or shared an object it becomes known as a Thingle, not a Pin, and these objects can be arranged into Collections, not Boards. In fact if you are an avid ‘Pinner’ you should pick up Thingle easily.

So what’s different? Thingle’s selling point is that it focuses on real world objects i.e. things you can touch, visit, taste, experience, travel to, buy or rent. This is the Wikipedia-like side of the site that sets Thingle apart from Pinterest. Thingle is attempting to implement this by encouraging users to give more information. When creating a Thingle users can add additional images from every angle, include links and add tags. Users can also later add to their Thingle by commenting and editing.

Can Thingle succeed? Its still early days for Thingle and the company faces a tough challenge trying to win market share from other social networks. Thingle’s main competitor is clearly Pinterest and I personally would say that Thingle’s stunning visual and user friendly environment trumps that of Pinterest. However, Pinterest has had a 3 year head start!

Thingle’s Facebook page already has over 62K likes which proves that the company is effectively raising brand awareness and Thingle was named as a Swiss TOP 100 Startups winner for 2012. From over 200,000 young companies, the 100 most innovative and promising Swiss startups were picked by top startup experts. Thingle claims that the beta version of the site is constantly improving and they have tons of useful features in the pipeline. Watch this space...


If you're impressed with Thingle.com you can nominate them for The Crunchies 2012, Best International Startup by clicking here.