After being created as a text-only destination nearly twenty years ago, the Web has increasingly become a visual destination, where images, photos and videos have replaced text as the new lingua franca of online influencers. In the evolutionary development from blogs to Facebook to Tumblr and now to Pinterest, there has been a steady shift toward more images and less text, as well as easier, one-click ways to share this visual content with everyone else on the Internet. In 2012, this shift will become even more profound, as sites like Pinterest lead to a re-thinking of not just the way we curate information on the Web, but also the ways that we purchase objects and discover new connections on the Web.

As Farhad Manjoo recently remarked on Fast Company, there can be no doubt by now that photos are the new killer app of the Web. If you want to get big fast on the Internet, re-focus your site around photos and images. That's certainly been the lesson of Instagram, which has become the largest mobile social network in the world thanks to its beguiling set of photo filters and easy sharing functionality. That was also the lesson of Fab.com, which rocketed to success in 2011 after shifting to a visual e-commerce layout.

There is perhaps no better way to understand this shift to a visual web than in the growth of Pinterest (and all the other pinboard clones). Now the darling of the fast adopter tech crowd, Pinterest has experienced explosive growth since its beta launch in March 2010. By some accounts, there are now more than 3 million active monthly members, all of whom are “pinning” their favorites across the Web and "re-pinning" the faves of their friends as well. Instead of curating this content in "streams" (as you would on Facebook or Twitter), people are now curating this content in "collections" that are meant to be browsed in their entirety rather than than a la carte.

Once the exclusive preserve of decorators, designers and DIY artisans, Pinterest is increasingly gaining traction with the types of people that you don't normally think of sitting around all day clipping out pictures and putting together mood boards. A company like Whole Foods has already attracted thousands of Pinterest followers with an addictive mix of images around themes like "delicious art" and "creative Christmas projects." And it's not just consumer-facing retailers with stuff to sell who are getting into the game - both The Washington Post and The Today Show also have created Pinterest boards.

And that's where things get interesting. We're not just talking about "pinning" pretty images or cool-looking products anymore, we're talking about "pinning" ideas. We're talking about media companies as lifestyle companies, about content creators as curators with a unique visual aesthetic.