New Year’s resolutions trend toward “less.” Less eating. Less spending. Less swearing. Less complaining.

But when you ask people about 2012 and the social media site Pinterest, they’ll tell you they want to spend more time on it.

Why?

Because the virtual bulletin board where you pin beautiful images of your hopes and dreams is all about organization, creativity and fun.

And in sharing these boards with our friends and even strangers, we’re inspiring each other. That’s at the heart of what makes Pinterest a happy place.

My own Pinterest journey didn’t begin so blissfully.

An artist told me about the site in 2010. She said design lovers like us “really get into Pinterest” and sent me an invitation that got jammed up in my email spam filter. During days of impatient waiting, I attempted to acquaint myself with the concept by going to Pinterest.com.

On a white background, there was a random smattering of images including stylish chairs, a rustic barn, pretty wedding invitations, magenta high heels, that Pattinson guy from “Twilight” and a knit baby hat. Huh? I consider myself a visual thinker, but this noisy eye candy just confused me. I dismissed Pinterest as something that wouldn’t interest me.

But a few months ago when a Pinterest invitation finally reached my inbox, I gave it another go. Many of my creative friends kept singing its praises. I signed up, and Pinterest instantly linked me up with Facebook friends who were also on the site.

The whole point is to create virtual bulletin boards with images that interest you. The Pinterest creators hand out some board titles to work from such as “My Style,” “For the Home,” “Books Worth Reading.” This all was starting to make sense.

After tucking my toddlers in bed, I spent more than two hours hunting for beautiful images and pinning my finds on Pinterest. Software makes digital images almost as easy to pin as ripped-out pages of a magazine onto a corkboard. Only with Pinterest, no clutter. And when you click on an image, the instructions for the project or the place to buy that unusual object are embedded into it — awesomely useful.

I looked to see what my friends were doing with their boards. The most interesting ones, I quickly learned, were microfocused. Instead of a broad category like “Fashion,” the more closely curated ones, like “Patterned Stockings,” “Chic Clutches” and so on, grabbed my attention. My own boards are evolving in this direction: “Pretty Piñatas,” “Legolicious,” “Paint Chip Possibilities.”

I can’t help but take trips back to memory lane when I’m bopping around on Pinterest, only to follow the breadcrumbs full circle back to the present day. Since I joined up in August when the scent of super-sharpened No. 2 pencils was perfuming the air, my mind raced back to my grade-school days. The box of 64 Crayola crayons was the most coveted supply, but it was too cool to actually accompany anyone to school. Like a prize, it remained at home. So I wondered how big the box had grown. Turns out it more than doubled to a carousel of 150. I pinned it up to my “School Supplies Wish List,” a board I created even though I’m not in school.

Strangers started repinning my 150 Crayola image and liking it (the “like” button isn’t just for Facebook). And a national trendspotter started following my boards. Office-supply enthusiasts unite!

Sometimes Pinterest simply puts a smile on my face. When I get my weekly Pinterest notifications, I say to myself, “By George, you’ve done it again.” A black-and-white portrait of George Clooney is my most repinned image, part of a board titled “B & W” that’s as much about excellent portraiture through light, shadow and composition as it is about the subjects.

And Pinterest occasionally makes me laugh out loud. I have a board titled “Meet Me in St. Louis” since that’s my hometown. Soon after Albert Pujols signed with the Angels, a stranger made this comment underneath the photo of Pujols in a Cardinals uniform: “fantasy baseball.” The humor took some of the sting out of the baseball hero’s new deal and move from the Midwest. But perhaps now it’s time to edit that board …

While many people still have never heard of Pinterest, the phenomenon keeps growing. In October, Pinterest had an estimated 3.3 million unique visitors in the U.S., up more than fivefold since June when it was at 608,000, according to estimates from comScore. Pinterest’s user growth rate is what Facebook’s was five years ago, according to a Techcrunch.com article titled “The Rise of Pinterest and the Shift From Searching to Discovering.”

Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra and Evan Sharp designed Pinterest, which launched from Palo Alto, Calif., in December 2009. Silbermann, an Iowa native, acts as the face and personality. As I write, he has 1,359,747 Pinterest followers and describes himself as an amateur chef and recently married. In an HGTV.com interview, he said his love of collecting things as a kid inspired the site. The first image he pinned was a silhouette cutout from Etsy.com, the marketplace for handmade. His mom later bought him the cutout to commemorate the first anniversary of Pinterest.

William Ward, a social media professor at Syracuse University, attributes the growing success of Pinterest to its creative component. By curating images, people are creating content. And these are people who might not consider themselves creative.

“This makes creativity easy,” Ward says.

And creativity is linked to happiness, which begets energy which begets action. Pinterest inspired projects that I completed this year. It helped inform The Kansas City Star’s Thanksgiving section in big and small ways. I saw a source had pinned an image of vintage flatware with spray-painted fluorescent handles onto her board “Let’s make something.” So I asked her to make the flatware and write helpful instructions on how to do it.

I’ve made coasters based on an image I repinned on Pinterest. Although the craft was time consuming, the project was worthwhile. The price was right, too. Made from free paint chips, 19-cent white ceramic tiles and Mod Podge, they made an inexpensive, attractive gift.

The priceless part of Pinterest: It creates windows into people’s souls. Through images, I can see vacations they’re planning, nurseries they’re designing, recipes they’re sampling, books they’re enjoying and Scripture they’re treasuring. I’ll pin their ideas, projects and values to inspire me in 2012 and maybe the years to come.