Josh Constine gives a brief history of Pinterest and then talks about the future in which they'd like to own an Interest Graph:

Building The Interest Graph: Unlike other social networks, Jenkins says that “Pinterest isn’t fundamentally about connecting people to other people. It’s about connecting people to interests.”

For years you had little but your own brain and the boards you browsed to find pinspiration. But now Pinterest is lending a helping hand thanks to a ton of data analysis. “Pins can’t exist unless they’re assigned to a board. Out of those boards, we try to identity interests through collaborative filtering, associative rule mining, natural language processing to provide discovery. I can pin five shirts I like and Pinterest derives my interest in fashion.” Recommendations could make Pinterest even more addictive for hardcore users, and help it retain newbies until they’re hooked.

Scaling Big Data: “Figuring out how we’re going to scale the data repositories for pins will only become more complicated as we grow internationally” Jenkins said. That why he says “we’re hiring pretty aggressively” in areas including machine learning, data mining, operations, and infrastructure.

Making Pins More Useful: Expect more pin types to gain expanded information like recipes did. “Useful” could also end up as a euphemism for “buyable”. Pinterest is renowned for driving traffic to ecommerce sites. If it could bring more of the shopping experience inside its site and apps, it could provide value to users while also arguing that it deserves a revenue share or commission from merchants.

Bringing The Grid Onto Mobile: Pinterest’s best known and most frequently copied element is its masonry grid design which allows for rapid intake of visual information. Now it’s trying to get the infinite scroll part of the grid to work on small screens with limited storage. “It’s easy to load things but your phone gets very angry with you if you don’t unload things”, Jenkins says. There’s also be a bit of bringing the mobile onto the grid, as Pinterest tries to take what it’s learning on mobile back to its website. That could include touch capabilities for touch-enabled laptops like the Chromebook Pixel.

Creating A Platform Foundation: “People keep asking ‘When are you going to release an API?’” Jenkins wouldn’t give a firm answer but did reveal a bunch of details. “We are working very closely with a very select set of partners to figure out what the API is that we should release. We are going to work with content providers to offer extended functionality so they can understand how the content they produce is being used in the Pinterest system. Content providers want distribution. If we can help them understand what resonates they’ll be happier, and Pinners will be happier as well.”

Don’t expect it to be rushed out “I might be overly rigorous in how I think about APIs. I want them to be extremely high quality” Jenkins says. Taking a dig at Facebook and Twitter, and following a similar thought pattern as Google+’s Vic Gundotra, he says “I don’t want to make mistakes other companies have made where they release APIs and then have to pull them back. I wouldn’t be proud of that.”

Today, Jenkins says that depending on what external traffic monitoring site you look at “we’re a top 15 site in the US and higher than that in terms of apps.” comScore currently pegs it at 48.7 million global monthly users. And while you might think Pinterest is a big popularity contest, Jenkins says that if you talk to long-time users, “many of them pin for themselves. They’re not using Pinterest to put on a show or posture externally. People view it as an act of self-expression.”

There's a lot keeping Pinterest busy.

They seem to care a lot more about smartphones and tablets than they do about The Web.

They won't have a general interest graph but they could own a lot of interests like fashion and shopping.

I'm also shocked that 50 million global monthly users == Top 15 U.S. website.

Way fewer websites have 50 million global monthly users than I thought.

On monetization, Pinterest recently added price drop alerts:

http://www.businessinsider.com/new-pinterest-feature-price-drop-alerts-2013-8