Note to Interwebs: Pinterest Can’t Be, And Won’t Be, Only About Images.

Pinterest is an interesting service – built entirely on the curation and sharing of images, and valued at billions of dollars. But when it comes time to lean into a business model, every service has to find and leverage its core DNA – and for Pinterest, it’s clear it can’t be images. That bus left a while ago (and Facebook was driving it, with Instagram riding shotgun and Snapchat….oh, never mind).

Anyway, two bits of news today that I think help us understand where Pinterest is going. First, Pinterest’s announcement that it’s getting into recipe search. And second, news that Pinterest is experimenting with GIFs.

To me, the conclusion is this: Pinterest is about collecting, curating, and sharing media objects, regardless of what they are. They can be images, which is how Pinterest got to its first jaw-dropping valuation. Or they can be….anything. Recipes? Sure. GIFs? Uh-huh. Web pages? Why not? Videos? Sure! Ummmm…files? Well, yeah, of course.

It seems everyone is converging on a simple set of facts: Our lives are digital, and we wish to share our lives. Pinterest came at it through images, artfully curated. Facebook came at it through friends, cunningly organized. Dropbox came to it via files, cleverly clouded. Countless others will come at the same opportunity through countless other ways. And countless others – Flickr, delicio.us, Friendster, Myspace – have already tried.

It’s getting a bit crowded, don’t you think?