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Zoomsphere has released a list of the 10 most-followed users on Pinterest. The most popular user? Co-founder Ben Silbermann's mom, Jane Wang.
Although Pinterest has not been able to confirm that the account is in fact run by Silbermann's mother, we do know that is his mother's name. A look at her Facebook profile, which is linked to her Pinterest profile, further indicates Wang's identity: She is friends with several other members of the Silbermann family, including Ben, and is a fan of just about everything Pinterest on Facebook. Interestingly, the profile had made its way onto a number of "top users to follow on Pinterest" lists, all apparently unaware of Wang's biological tie to the founder.
Beyond Wang and Pinterest's two co-founders, the rest of the top 10 are a little more diverse. Five identify themselves as designers of various stripes, one is a style blogger and one is a marketer. We were impressed with the number of followers these users were able to attract, particularly because 1) many users prefer to follow individual boards, rather than users; and 2) Pinterest offers few user discovery options compared to other social media services. Users usually have to do a fair bit of clicking through to locate and then follow the original source of a pin, and the service doesn't yet offer up recommendations on whom to follow.
Zoomsphere CEO Jakub Mach says the data was compiled with the aid of web crawlers, since Pinterest has not yet made an API publicly available.