“Pinyata” The Underground in Social Media
By Efren Martinez
From scoring big artist interviews to getting the pre-sale codes of an upcoming concert, Pinyata is one of my biggest tools I have when it comes to reaching out to professional recording stars and their agents. It’s also a great source to get the latest on fashion, art, music videos and movies. Since it’s fairly new, I like to refer to it as the underground in social media. But that’s rapidly changing as thousands of new users are now busting open their own Pinyata daily. Ya; that sounds corny, but I like it.
Just recently I hooked up via email with the creator of Pinyata, Steven Puri, to find out more on why and what makes Pinyata the new must have social network on your cell phone.
MV: What inspired you to create Pinyata?
SP: Well, until we realized none of our friends used Facebook anymore except as a phone book to find people. Facebook was filled with spammy ads and reposts of articles by some guy we met once at a party five years ago. Our own awesome photos and videos rarely showed up for our real friends.
We rebelled and just said, “back in the day, Facebook rocked! What if old Facebook was invented TODAY for an iPhone??”
That’s what Pinyata is – the simple fun of Facebook from its glory days. That’s all it is!
You and your friends can post TOGETHER – photos, GIFs and soon videos and talk about them and see who gets the most balloons (which are like a “like”). Pinyata lets you group all your stuff together so you can have a party or go to a concert and put everybody’s stuff in one story so the next day you can go back and look at every single photo from the night with everyone’s funny comments! It’s like the Journal of Fun for you & your friends.
MV: How long has Pinyata been available?
SP: We started testing it out last summer and we launched the real version around the holidays in 2014 and the response has been amazing. We’re signing up thousands of users each night and we’re averaging almost 1,000,000 posts viewed a day!
MV: What makes Pinyata different from other social media sites?
SP: We LOVE the pretty photos of Instagram, but we wanted to POST PHOTOS TOGETHER with our friends – keep all of the photos of that adventure grouped together with all our funny comments. We also wanted to post A BUNCH OF PHOTOS without “blowing up everyone’s feeds.” In Instagram we really can’t post all the photos…nor can we group everyone’s together.
We LOVE Snapchat but we wanted to SAVE the photos, videos, GIFs and comments.
Twitter is not so addictive for us as it seems more like a way to make short text announcements and spread news; It’s never felt emotional at all to us. It’s more like a newspaper. We wanted to capture the joy, the real fun of our lives…and share it.
MV: Where do you see Pinyata’s growth in a year from now?
SP: It’s really up to our users – we are getting tons of comments and suggestions from our power users and we read them every day and they help guide us. We’re releasing the ability to make short videos now as this was top of everyone’s list. Really, our goal is each night to make Pinyata 1% more delightful for our fans….
Pinyata’s Platforms: Both Apple and Android
The app is only available on mobile devices
Download it for free from the app stores on your mobile devices or from the website, here: https://pinyata.com/
Follow me, Efren J on Pinyata under the call name Backstageboy.
Other Pinyata Media:
Facebook: facebook.com/pinyata
Instagram: @pinyataapp
Twitter: @pinyata
