Pinterest is blowing up, its one of those new app crazes that has really struck a chord, primarily with women. Its all over the media and blogosphere, and everyone is talking about staggering user counts and how much traffic can drive to a website.

I started playing with the Pinterest API to see what the potential of the platform is beyond just the consumer side. The API is simple, yet robust and each and every pin potentially has latitude, longitude and other location information associated with it.

To date the consumer side of Pinterest is is organized by category and very photo based for exploration and discovery. The local potential of Pinterest doesn’t even seem tapped at all yet, leaving huge opportunity for developers to build something cool that allows users to explore interesting things in a map, by city, neighborhood, zip code or in real-time via their mobile phone.

With this opportunity I’m adding it to my developer opportunity list. Seems like Pinterest API combined with CityGrid Places, Offers and Reviews APIs, you could make some interesting user experiences allowing web and mobile users to explore interesting things right around them.

You could easily monetize just by showing CityGrid places along with Pinterest content, and if you wanted to further monetize with CityGrid local advertising. I’m going to play with some PHP, Python and Ruby samples for Pinterest + CityGrid integrations, then maybe some mobile samples as well.

Let me know if you have any ideas as well.