Pinterest's top pins of 2013 involve bacon, 3D printing
The diversity of the Internet is on full display with Pinterest's top trending pins from the past year. Beer-candied bacon, anyone?
Picture-sharing social-media site Pinterest has combed through its overload of visual archives and named the top trending pins of 2013. Mercifully, the mason-jar wedding centerpiece trend seems to have died down a bit.
There are some interesting items tucked into the various categories. For example, meatball bubble biscuits make a surprising appearance as a top recipe pin despite looking like dinosaur eggs. Judging by the sheer amount of melted cheese, chocolate, bacon, and taco cupcakes, Pinterest users aren't too obsessed with counting calories.
The realm of technology is represented, showing a popular interest in waterproof devices, 3D printing, smartwatches (particularly the Neptune Pine), and a transparent iPad concept. An incredibly long pin showing the most popular WordPress plug-ins also made the top trending list despite a clear lack of eye-candy visuals.
While Pinterest is notorious for wedding-planning photos, the geek world still has its place on the site, with "Doctor Who" and "The Hobbit" pins beating out the competition. Actor Nathan Fillion puts in an appearance with a visual shout-out to nerd girls. We love you, too, Nathan.
The online world's obsession with cute things spills over onto Pinterest, with a yawning kitten and a pile of puppies hitting the top list. A couple of jellyfish also made the cut, so it's not all about things with fur. In other news, Pinterest users are into hipster haircuts for guys, unicorns, and writing on their washing machines with dry-erase markers.
It's hard to determine what the top pins say about our online society, other than that there is an incredible amount of diversity of interests. You could attempt to craft a Frankenstein pin that would hit on a host of the hot topics, but it would come out looking like a bowtie-wearing historic Japanese female warrior eating a 3D-printed churro waffle at a geothermal spa in Iceland.