Will Pinterest become the champion of saving online content?

With Pinterest changing its “Pin It” button to “Save” a few months ago, they are focusing on the saving aspect of content, instead of pinning it to a visual board. Pinning, saving. What’s the difference?

• Pinning something to a board implies short-term use. You have a project going on, and you want to gather information on coffee tables. Or garden ideas.
• Saving implies you are keeping it for the long term, as an archive.

Changing the button name from “Pin It” to “Save” puts Pinterest more in the realm of an archive.

Today Pinterest has acquired Instapaper, a service that lets you save articles to read later. Now Pinterest is further focusing on the notion of saving for the long-term, instead of short-term. This emphasis on the importance of an archive is quite refreshing in comparison to the constant stream we’ve seen in Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram.

With this focus on saving instead of pinning, Pinterest could change its name to start with “Save” instead of “Pin.” A few ideas: Savenue, Savenger. Ok, those are pretty bad, hard to pronounce. Strange looking. Almost looks like savage. Although the idea of Save + Avenger might appeal more to a male audience, but alienate their core of “Midwestern moms.”

Perhaps Pinterest’s audience will expand behind the female demographic. Instapaper’s CEO said, “The missions of Instapaper and Pinterest are aligned in helping people easily save content.” Anyone would want to save content, not just the Midwestern mom. The Pinterest+Instapaper combination might prove to be very powerful. Engadget reports:

In a lot of ways, the acquisition makes sense. It’s a way for Pinterest to leverage a feature that not many people know about, plus it’s now able to use Instapaper’s tech to help the discoverability of its other pins too. Pinterest could now very well be positioned to be the one-stop shop for bookmarking anything and everything on the web.

This Pinterest+Instapaper merger makes you wonder what other archiving services like Evernote think about this. Evernote is the ultimate online saving service, however, they extremely lack in the social features that Pinterest has. Your Evernote notebooks are pretty much hidden underneath your own bed. You can only share your own notebook with individual people, not the entire web.

I’m a pretty hard-core user of all three services. Pinterest (2,765 pins on 149 boards), Instapaper (150 articles read this year), and Evernote (14,000 notes). For now what I see right now, there’s a clear distinction among all the services:

• Pinterest: where you save images
• Instapaper: where you save articles to read later
• Evernote: where you save articles for forever, not to read later, but to have as a sort of memory. For those situations where you say, “what was that article about XYZ topic that I read a couple years ago?”

Perhaps Pinterest is looking to get a leg up on Evernote by becoming a place for your long-term memory for both images, and now articles.