(hubze) There is a new social network on the block, driving more traffic than YouTube, and grabbing the user-ship of huge names that are way too cool for Facebook…and i’ll bet you never even heard of it.

Pinterest is a social pin board where users amass their interests (“pinning”) into a streamline mosaic of photographs and blurbs. There is a Pinterest devoted to the weird, the geeky, and the world.

Pinterest lets you organize and share all the beautiful things you find on the web. People use pinboards to plan their weddings, decorate their homes, and organize their favorite recipes.

Best of all, you can browse pinboards created by other people. Browsing pinboards is a fun way to discover new things and get inspiration from people who share your interests.

So it’s pretty simple, people connect through their interests. It is not necessarily a phony friend-friend relationship, or the kind of place that you will be constantly avoiding your the watchful eye of your grandmother. And I can guarantee you that all of your old high-school classmates wont come looking for you.

The layout is reminiscent of Timeline with a huge emphasis on images (maybe Facebook took a little interest in Pinterest).

The network is only two years old and it is driving loads of traffic. According to Shareaholic, Pinterest drives more combined referral traffic than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn.

Of course Facebook drives the most traffic (about 8x more than Google), but Pinterest is defiantely a rising star, sitting pretty next to Twitter.

And retailers can kneel down and pray to Pintrest’s Etiquette code that encourages users to credit their sources by linking back to the original source, “the original source is always preferable to a secondary source such as Google Image Search or a blog entry.”

More and more people are going to Pinterest prior to visiting retailer sites. The combination of Pinterest Etiquette and the network’s booming popularity has made Pinterest a top traffic driver for retailers.  It is a social consumer paradise, the land of silk and money.

Comment and let us know what you think about Pinterest.