About 24 percent of teens who go online were using Twitter at the end of 2012, marking a dramatic increase from the 16 percent who were on Twitter in 2011. The new findings on teen social media use and attitudes toward online privacy come from a new report from the Pew Research Center, “Teens, Social Media and Privacy,” that’s set to release on Tuesday. Here’s how things changed in just a year:

Apart from the raw numbers, Pew conducted focus groups with teens across the country to get feedback on how they use different sites. Here are the five most important trends you should know about teens and social media:

1. Teens are outpacing the grown-ups on Twitter

The rise in Twitter use among teens is particularly interesting since adult adoption hovers around 16 percent, according to the latest Pew report on adult social media use. Numbers among online teens are even stronger for African-Americans, 39 percent of whom are on the service (compared to 23 percent of white teens). Teens have shown a remarkable adoption of the service since 2009, when Pew first asked about the site, when only 9 percent reported using it.

2. Public is the new private on Twitter

The majority of teen Facebook users have their accounts set to private, but not so on Twitter. Some 64 percent of teens have Twitter accounts set to public so anyone can read their tweets, with 24 percent setting their accounts to private. Perhaps of most concern, 12 percent reported they didn’t know whether their tweets were public or private.

3. Teens are tired of Facebook, but they’re still using it

The media has been reporting teens abandoning Facebook for years now, but the Pew report finds that like a lot of adults, teens are frusterated by Facebook but stay on the platform because of the integral social role it still plays. The report explains: They dislike the increasing number of adults on the site, get annoyed when their Facebook friends share inane details, and are drained by the “drama” that they say is portrayed frequently on the site. The stress of needing to manage their reputation on Facebook also contributes to the lack of enthusiasm.” Yet 94 percent of them still use the site.

4. Tumblr numbers still aren’t very high

Yahoo might have liked the younger audience on Tumblr when it decided to acquire the site, but teen use of Tumblr is still pretty low. Only five percent reported using the site in 2012, although that’s up from 2 percent in 2011, a decent jump.

5. The subtweet goes mainstream

You heard it here first: 58 percent of teens are making inside inside jokes or sharing “cloaked messages” on social media.

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While buying Tumblr isn’t necessarily a bad deal for the two companies, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, there’s another photo site out there that might have been an even better deal: Pinterest.

In many ways, Pinterest is also building a mobile-friendly photo site just like Tumblr, but Pinterest is also in the midst of constructing the underpinnings for a potentially much more lucrative native revenue experience. Pinterest is oriented around commerce and consumers craving particular items. That’s good for business.

No, buying Pinterest wouldn’t help Yahoo discover its inner tween. It’s a well-known fact that Pinterest is populated mainly by adult women — not exactly the demographic Yahoo needs to attract. And no, considering Pinterest’s valuation as of its last funding round, such an acquisition probably wouldn’t have come cheap. Acquiring the company would require a much bigger departure from Yahoo’s current mass-market advertising into the world of e-commerce and affliate links. It could be a harder sell to the company’s investors, and a bigger transition for everyone.

But if Yahoo is looking to shell out the big bucks for a site with viral growth, visuals to compete with Facebook, and a devoted community of users, Pinterest might have been the better choice. According to a Pew report in December, out of all online adults (which is basically anyone with an internet connection), just six percent of those people visited Tumblr on a regular basis, compared with 13 percent on Instagram (which isn’t exactly for sale), and 15 percent on Pinterest — only Twitter comes in at 16 percent ahead of the others and behind behemoth Facebook at 67 percent.

Less than a year out of beta, Pinterest is a dominant force on the web; a place where women of all ages collect photos of things that inspire them or things that they want to remember or create. For many, it’s a digital wish-list. And because of that, Pinterest sends huge amounts of traffic to online retailers. To be the intermediary between the people and the stores is a good place to be — you’re a crucial link that drives the sales, without any of the hassle of shipping or orders or user acquisitions that come with e-commerce.

Pinterest CEO Ben Silbermann at the company’s new offices in San Francisco.

Pinterest has no business model in place right now — the site is free to join and for brands to integrate with — but that’s just right now, and it likely won’t last. The company just announced yesterday that it is starting to connect photos of items back to the brands who sell them, and it’s not hard to image how this could play out.

Tumblr does have a business model right now based on ads, and it just started rolling them out on mobile users in April. But the company has been reportedly burning through cash and not yet making a lot of revenue, hoping to bring in $100 million this year. But people are usually pretty unhappy about a free product suddenly peppering them with ads — especially if those ads are dropped into a feed that users have created (just ask anyone how they feel about Facebook ads.) CEO David Karp said at our paidContent event just last month that he wants advertising on the site to be native and unobstrusive.

“We focused on higher up in the funnel, the type of advertising that creates intent,” Karp told us in April. “It gives room for the most creative advertisers to create their best work. I think we’ve started to prove it, and see really good examples of it.”

But that’s a hard nut to crack.

Suddenly, the possible Pinterest model of taking a cut on sales and traffic resulting from users creating digital shopping lists looks a lot less disruptive to the core experience, and potentially more lucrative, than trying to solve mobile display ads for the Tumblr feed. Making money off traffic and sales wouldn’t disrupt Pinterest’s core product, and would generally fit in with the company’s existing user experience, just as promoted tweets are fitting with Twitter’s on both desktop and mobile (a profitable venture so far estimated to bring Twitter $528 million in ad revenue this year.)

So no, buying Pinterest wouldn’t make Yahoo all that hip. But buying the site that has potential to become a strong force in modern, social retail? Seems like a good bet — especially since teens might leave you once Mom joins and you become mainstream.

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On Monday, the team at Pinterest finally moved into the company’s newly-renovated offices, and GigaOM got a tour of the new digs and sat down with CEO Ben Silbermann, who talked about where the company is headed now that it’s settled into the new location. Pinterest now has about 100 employees, and we’ve written before about how Pinterest has been able to maintain a culture of collaboration between designers and engineers in part due to its relatively small size.

Pinterest’s new digs in San Francisco.

“We are heads down on execution,” Silbermann said.

Pinterest announced back in November that it would be rolling out some options specifically for businesses, and it announced a web analytics product in March. But for a company that just raised $200 million, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion, it seems likely that we’ve only just starting see what the company has planned.

Recent Comscore numbers put the company’s traffic at about 48 million global users, and while the company has made no moves into e-commerce yet, the vast number of people “pinning” photos of items certainly presents a lot of money-making avenues for the company down the line. Silbermann said the company will be announcing an update to Pinterest in a few weeks:

“We’ve already indicated Pinterest for business and and Pinterest insights are some of the foundational things for the company,” he said. “Our focus has been to become a very valuable service.”

When Silbermann spoke at our Roadmap conference in November 2012, he talked about the challenges in keeping a user’s attention as the web and smartphones increasingly pull them in different directions. One thing that could keep users on Pinterest more often is the tablet, which Silbermann called “the device of the future.” But even more than securing user eyeballs, he talked about his desire to translate actions on Pinterest into everyday life.

“We want to make pinning actionable,” he said.

We’ll be talking more in depth about design at GigaOM’s RoadMap 2013 in November in San Francisco (to be the first to access tickets, which will go on sale this Summer, go here). Here are some more of Om’s photos of the company’s new offices:

Decor in the new Pinterest office in San Francisco.

The team at Pinterest talks things over in the new offices.

A view of the new Pinterest offices and eating options from above.

Work spaces at Pinterest.

The new Pinterest offices are fairly open and light by design.

Room to sit down and talk at Pinterest.

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The company explained its decision in a blog post on the site:

“We have some bittersweet news. We are extremely happy to announce that salesforce.com has signed an agreement to acquire Clipboard, allowing us to pursue our mission of saving and sharing the Web on a much larger scale. But at the same time we’re also sad to see this stage of our adventure come to an end, especially since it means that our relationship with you, our users, will irreversibly change. As a result of this news, the Clipboard service at clipboard.com will be discontinued on June 30, 2013.”

I wrote about Clipboard back in September 2012 when it launched its iPhone app and new desktop design. At the time, I noted the similarities between the service and Pinterest, in that they both allow you to save items from across the web and organize that content into “boards.” The Clipboard service allowed you to save links in a way that made them private and fairly useful because of the amount of content that came embedded in clipped material.

“Anyone who’s used Pinterest before will feel immediately familiar with Clipboard — the design is almost identical to the Pinterest layout, with the option of grabbing material from across the web, saving that material to “boards,” and liking other people’s posts.

But Clipboard doesn’t seem like a site for wedding daydreams or fashion photos in the way Pinterest does. Clipboard posts, or “clips,” default to private, and unlike Pinterest’s static photos, Clipboard clips retain almost all of their original web functionality, making them seem more like helpful notes-to-self in the vein of Instapaper or Evernote.”

In the company’s closing post, it reported that the service only gathered 140,000 users who created about 3 million clips. By comparison, last August Evernote had 40 million users, up from 25 milion in May 2012.

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A few months ago I heard about Wanelo and downloaded the app to give it a spin. At its simplest, Wanelo is exactly like Pinterest — except you can click through to purchase anything posted to the site. But when I first installed the app, I was greeted with photos of cut-off shorts, backless dresses, cat pictures, sparkly nail polish, and the like. It was like a 13-year old girl’s heaven. But it wasn’t exactly my style. I couldn’t figure out how to make the main feed reflect my tastes, and I quickly lost interest.

On Tuesday, the company is altering its formula to help people get into Wanelo more quickly, changing the signup process to show people how to follow brands and people (which I struggled with on the old version), and then showing users their curated feeds as the default page of the app rather than what’s trending generally on Wanelo.

Wanelo was founded in 2010 by CEO Deena Varshavskaya but has exploded in popularity in recent months primarily among teenaged and early-20′s women. The company has grown from 1 million registered users in November to 8 million in May, which wouldn’t necessarily mean much, but the company reports that users spend an average of 50 minutes a day on Wanelo. Even among a small group of users, that’s a lot of time, when you consider people spend about 30 minutes a day on Facebook. And a Twitter search for the word “Wanelo” is essentially a feed of (primarily women) discussing their Wanelo addictions.

Varshavskaya said women in the primary age group for Wanelo were becoming obsessed with the app, and as soon as they opened it, they felt at home among the products shown on the trending page. But for anyone else who doesn’t dig sparkles, it was harder to show them the appeal of Wanelo.

“For them, the feed is an amazing, addictive experience,” Varshavskaya said. “For them it’s an awesome first experience. But the downside is that the trending feed cannot by definition work for everyone.”

It seems the re-design fixes the initial signup challenges, but the obvious question is still how Wanelo can distinguish itself from Pinterest, which has raised a lot of money at this point and is pretty much the default social network for saving images and products on the web right now.

Varshavskaya and Wanelo’s investors, which include prominent names like Ann Miura-Ko of Floodgate, Naval Ravikant of AngelList, Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures and Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, are quick to explain their confidence in the company. Wanelo is fundamentally oriented toward commerce and transactions rather than aspirational photos like Pinterest or Tumblr, Varshavskaya said. And it’s true that if you’re looking to purchase an attractive item and want inspiration, Amazon might not be your best bet, and it’s frustrating when you click a link on Pinterest and discover that it’s broken.

So what’s the future for Wanelo? The company seems ripe for acquisition, either by Pinterest itself or another shopping site like Amazon looking to get into social shopping. Pinterest will surely add a commerce component soon, and while it will be a challenge for Pinterest to transition from a site full of photos to a site with shoppable links, it’s surely a challenge the company will try to solve.

And as much as I got into the new Wanelo app, I still found myself saving aspirational items like an $1,800 necklace. Which feels pretty much how people use Pinterest.

If you’re interested in design and the future of web brands, make sure to check out our RoadMap Conference in November in San Francisco (be the first to access tickets here when they go on sale this Summer).

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But at Pinterest, the social media darling that has seen incredible user growth over the past few year and whose design has copied widely, the designers and engineers have one seemingly-improbable message: We can do both. At least for now, anyway: one of Pinterest’s greatest challenges in turning from web sensation into a viable business will be its ability to adhere to these principles as revenue and profit pressures sink in.

I talked with Pinterest software engineer Joshua Inkenbrandt and lead product designer Jason Wilson this week, and we discussed the recent Pinterest re-design: specifically, how both visual and engineering elements played into the overhaul, and how those tensions play out at Pinterest. The two were obviously passionate about the issue, re-iterating the unique qualities of Pinterest’s internal culture and the crossover between their roles. At one point, Inkenbrandt referred to a feature that Wilson had designed, and Wilson automatically jumped in to correct him:

“It’s the designs that I visualize. We’re all designers.”

But at an awful lot of companies, designers and engineers aren’t finishing each other’s sentences. Kleiner Perkins partner and former Twitter VP of engineering Michael Abbott explained the tensions best at our Structure:Data conference this week: “The tension on the design side is that it’s never good enough,” he said, “and on the engineering side he or she wants to ship… How do you get that balance? Because you still need to ship.”

Building a culture of mutual respect

It’s not that Pinterest is somehow immune from the tensions that other companies face. In fact, Wilson and Inkenbrandt noted that they think the media has probably underplayed just how much the site has changed over the years and the compromises that are inherent in every tweak:

“With every feature, there’s that tension between it being beautiful and then figuring out how hard it is to actually implement it. So everything you see on the new site has actually gone through that balance,” Inkenbrandt said. For instance, just looking at the main Pinterest grid — which doesn’t feel like it’s changed all that much since the site launched in limited beta in March 2010 — you would never know the number of iterations it has gone through.

Ben Silbermann, CEO, Pinterest RoadMap 2012 (c) 2012 Pinar Ozger pinar@pinarozger.com

“We’ve iterated on that 70+ times,” said Inkenbrandt, who just joined the company slightly more than a year ago. Of course, rapid iteration on the web wasn’t invented at Pinterest: Google’s web development strategy in its early years, overseen in large part by current Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, blazed this trail for a generation of Silicon Valley engineers and designers.

In the relatively short time Inkenbrandt has been with Pinterest, the company has grown from about 17 employees to more than 100. Pinterest does not release official user stats, but recent ComScore numbers put users of the popular social content pinning site at more than 48 million unique visitors globally, and a February Pew report put the percentage of online adults using Pinterest at 15 percent, which is about the same as the number who use Twitter. The company recently raised $200 million in a new round of financing, putting its valuation at $2.5 billion.

So the fact that the company has managed to weather this type of rapid growth without any notable or constant outages (just compare to the number of fail whales in Twitter’s early years), while also remaining one of the most-copied designs on the web at the moment, certainly speaks to Pinterest’s ability to balance both priorities.

It comes down to the company’s culture, the two said, in that the company values open communication among employees and prioritizes the goals of both designers and engineers. Of course, whether this can scale along with the company is always in question — it’s easier to support both when you’re just a 20 person operation. But the two said that heavy involvement from co-founder Evan Sharp plays a key role in fostering that balance.

“Evan himself designed and coded the original site,” Wilson said. “So we know that at the end of the day he understands what it takes to get it done.”

Wilson, who’s designed for companies like Apple, Lytro, and Adobe, said he thinks the company’s efforts to make sure new hires understand the importance of collaborative culture has helped keep the company on that track:

“I’m basically a vagabond in the industry. I’ve worked at a hell of a lot of places. And every place has its way of doing things. When I worked at Apple, it was very design-centric, and things came from the direction of the executive and it’s thrown over the wall at the engineers. And I’ve worked at places like Adobe, where they develop the features and then say, make it look good. And I don’t believe personally — and this is just a personal opinion — that either of those really are ideal. It’s not bullshit to say that here, it’s a total team effort. I can point to a design element, like actual pixel-level design elements, that Josh gave me creative direction on.”

Design and engineering building the new look

Pinterest rolled out its new design to the general public earlier this week, and to the un-trained (or un-Pinterested) eye, the new look wouldn’t seem too different. But two key changes to the look — larger pins, or photos, that come with the content suggestions along the side, and a new way to remain in-stream while scrolling — actually started at engineering problems that were solved by the design team.

The engineering team had long wanted to fix some of the structural issues that had come with the site’s rapid growth, Inkenbrandt said, and one of them was how to suggest more content for users in a way that was both natural and useful. But in the end, it was Wilson’s design team that found an answer to the recommendation engine quest, by surfacing similar pins from boards users had created:

“One of our challenges was how to recommend content,” Inkenbrandt said. “So we’re coming up with like, secret sauce algorithms, where we’re trying to figure out based on content what people might like. And then it turns out that based off the design, just having the actual board where the pin was from, well, that content is obviously highly relevant, usually in the same theme, and can help people find great stuff.”

By showing related content next to individual pins, and then allowing users to navigate to that content without leaving their spot in the stream, also solved another engineering issue with navigation. Wilson said Sharp gave him and the designer some high-level goals for the re-design, and one was to make the overall feel much more lightweight.

“Before, you would look at one close-up and then go back to the grid and then back to the close-up. So we wanted to figure out a way so you wouldn’t have to do that jump. It seems like a simple thing, but if you’re on there for an hour let’s say, and you do that repeatedly, you might do that a few hundred times.” he said. “To me anyway the holy grail to navigation is to get to the user to navigate via content.”

But while Pinterest has been able to balance the priorities of design and functionality fairly remarkably so far, the rubber might be about to hit the road. The company has been nudging its way toward a business model recently, adding features like analytics for businesses and encouraging marketers to the site, which makes sense if the company is going to live up to that $2.5 billion valuation.

But just ask Twitter and Facebook: it’s a lot easier balancing design and engineering when salespeople aren’t breathing down your neck every day.

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The idea is somewhat similar to those Magnetic Poetry Kits: Users slide preselected words on top of artwork to create a poem. “The whole process takes less than a minute on your phone or tablet,” Storybird posted on its blog Thursday.

Storybird CEO Mark Ury told me that about 20 percent of the works that users created on Storybird were poetry,”so we knew we had demand.”

On the blog, he outlined the reasons that the company is excited about launching a poetry option:

“1. Fits on a phone, so that our members can use it anywhere. We want visual storytelling everywhere, because people and their stories are everywhere.

2. An even simpler storytelling format. Stories are hard to write and take time! Poetry is short and sweet. We used the same creative constraints for Poetry as we did with books: you can do only one thing, but that one thing is fantastic.

3. Poems are hyper social and look great on Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. Your friends, family, and fans can easily read, share, and embed them.

4. They’re stunning. Poetry scales from the phone to the desktop (an AMAZING engineering and aesthetic feat from the team) to ensure the art looks great. It uses the same colour algorithms as our book covers and includes a light transparency on the word vessels, which makes the final compositions elegant and rich.

5. As with books and artwork comments, Poetry is designed to be family friendly. The word sets are fixed and were developed by a seasoned book editor from one of the Big Six publishing houses to enable creative expression without creative maligning.” (Ury wouldn’t say who the editor is.)

Storybird, which launched in 2010, has over two million members. The company has raised $850,000 in seed funding and is advised by former Tumblr exec John Maloney. The site operates on a freemium model, selling memberships to teachers and individuals, and also lets users pay to download stories as PDFs or order print versions of their creations. If the poetry model takes off, Ury says, Storybird will “sell downloads to print at home. If those do well, we’ll offer professionally printed cards or small posters.”

Many Storybird customers are schools. The poetry option isn’t rolled out for school accounts yet, but will be available to them soon.

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Key highlights in this report include:

• For publishers, the first step to monetizing something is to be able to measure it. The analytics tools now available make it possible to track the spread of content on social platforms closely.

• Until now there has not been a marketplace where those potential buyers and sellers of content could meet. Nor were there adequate tools to enable verifiable transactions between them. Tools like Cascade and Ricochet are helping put the foundations of such a market in place.

• Both publishers and licensees will need to seize the sort of ad hoc syndication opportunities that arise online and on social media networks. One of the major tasks facing publishers over the next three to five years will be to structure their repositories of content so they can be searched, sorted, customized, repackaged, and accessed in real time via standardized APIs.

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In an emailed statement, Pinterest explained why it sees the Livestar team as a good fit for joining the company:

“We are happy to announce that we have agreed to acquire a startup called Livestar and will be bringing their talented engineering team onboard.  Livestar is an app that helps people find local recommendations from their friends and others. We think the Livestar team is a natural fit for Pinterest because of their commitment to inspiring people to do things in their everyday lives through social and expert recommendations.

The Livestar engineering team will be joining Pinterest in the coming weeks. CEO and founder Fritz Lanman will not be joining the team, but he will continue to advise Pinterest. An active angel investor in startups including Pinterest, Fritz will continue to invest and advise startups and will be undertaking a new, yet to be announced project.”

Livestar will be closing down, less than a year after launching in June 2012, when we wrote about the company’s vision and explained the rationale behind Lanman’s approach:

“The result of Lanman’s work is Livestar, a new iPhone app (Android coming soon) that makes it easy to find the two kinds of recommendations that matter most to many users: friend suggestions and professional reviews. The app serves as a sort of search engine, Q&A platform and review aggregator, combining elements of Yelp, Google, Quora, Metacritic and Facebook. But while many of those services started on the desktop web, Livestar is built from the ground up to be mobile only.”

Just this week Pinterest announced the wider launch of its new redesign, which includes larger photos and a smaller activity feed. Pinterest also recently released a web analytics tool for brands, just after announcing a new $200 million funding round.

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