It started when I brought up the subject of Rakuten’s investment in Pinterest at a dinner prior to the start of an Abacus underground event in Bangkok – a subject I think is more interesting than the valuation of Facebook, by the way.

That got Tudor Conan of travel search start-up Flocations excited. “Pinterest is the first thing that’s come along that’s defined the sexuality of the Internet. Women get it, men don’t.

“And that’s the thing about the Internet – I am aged 29, and this scares me. This is something I don’t understand.”

I told him to put a girl on his team which is now four guys who started the company which recently received investment from JFDI Asia.

It will be interesting to see what Rakuten does with Pinterest. It recently led a US$100 million investment, valuing the company at $1.5 billion.

According to this article in TechCrunch, Rakuten’s CEO Hiroshi Mikitani wants “Rakuten to grow right there with it by using Rakuten’s services to become the basis for buying things off the site”.

Rakuten already pins on Pinterest through at least a couple of official accounts: Rakuten Commerce and Rakuten Travel. Rakuten gives Pinterest a powerful e-commerce platform – according to Mikitani, 75 percent of Japan’s internet population — equivalent to about 80 million people — already have a Rakuten ID.

It is this ID that will pontentially become the lynchpin of a commercial service on Pinterest, said the article. “We want to enable our users to pin their own images with our ID,” he told TechCrunch. “Users can click and buy with it, and in the future we can create more new services.”

He notes that the “rich, graphic social network” can be used for “so many interesting ideas using the Rakuten ID.”

And here’s what Mikitani thinks about Facebook vs Pinterest – he says that while Facebook is an “extremely powerful social network”, when it comes to shopping and e-commerce, Pinterest’s image-led service “has stronger potential.”

At the dinner, Ross Veitch of Wego (pictured above) also said that his site was launching a new visual user interface, inspired by Pinterest. “It will make it visually more interesting to search,” he said. With 55% of Wego’s users female, this could work well.

Hosting our dinner, which by the way was an extremely visual experience given that it was held on top of the high-rise Lebua hotel, was Gai Tyrrell, CEO of Sabre Pacific (pictured with Ross) who confirmed, “I am totally visual.”

So people, prepare for the new sexuality of the Internet.