Pinterest integration turns content discovery site Trapit into a pinner’s dream

If you’ve been paying attention to the web lately, or the special lady in your life according to its demographics, you might know that the curation service Pinterest is on fire. The site lets you add interesting things you find on the web to a virtual pinboard to share with your friends.

Trapit on the other hand is a service that launched in November that does the searching for you, based on keywords having to do with your interests. The two services might be a match made in heaven for pinning when paired together.

I spoke with Trapit co-founder & Chief Product Officer Hank Nothhaft today about that very topic, along with how Trapit is doing since its launch. He shared some interesting stats with me, and says the site has had 3M unique users since launch, and those users save 10 searches on average, which the company calls “traps”. The site also signs up an impressive 20k unique users a day.

Today, the service has launched a simple integration with Pinterest with a big payoff for users of both sites.

Let Trapit find cool things to pin

When you sign up for Trapit, all you have to do is enter a search phrase and the site the will find relevant news and sites on the web that match it. The sources are vetted, so you won’t get a bunch of junk and spam like when you use Google Alerts for a similar reason.

More importantly, you can interact with the things that Trapit finds and just by giving it a thumbs up or down, the service learns a bit more about your tastes and refines future search results you to better suit you.

In the example above, I’ve told Trapit to find stories for me about the Super Bowl, and within seconds, the results start pouring in. I can save that search as a “trap”, and the service will continually find me new things about the subject. You can click on individual stories for reading or sharing, as well as clearing them out of the “Trap”. By doing so, Trapit knows what type of content to focus on for you.

Since Trapit is doing all of the heavy lifting for you by way of searching for new items continually for all of your traps, an integration with Pinterest is absolutely perfect. Consider Trapit as the discovery engine for your pinboards. If you have a pinboard full of things that are orange, simply create a Trap for it and watch the content flow in. Once you find something, you’ll now be able to share it directly on Pinterest.

The reason why Trapit is now focusing on sending content to Pinterest is because the company noticed all of the inbound traffic it was getting from the site. Nothhaft told me that Pinterest easily sends them 5-6 times the traffic that Tumblr or StumbleUpon does. The company also had users asking them for the ability to easily pin content found on its site, so the feature was a no-brainer, plus the founders are already power users of the site.

If you’re a Pinterest Pro like the founders of Trapit and want to find a steady stream of cool things to share on Pinterest, then it’s worth giving the site a try. Even if you’re not a Pinterest user, finding really interesting things is made simple with Trapit, as they have sections of the site dedicated to featured Traps and hot content.

➤ Trapit