What you say? There’s an app for creating a book of Facebook memories? WooHoo!
Before you laugh, remember that people love stuff. Harry Potter fanatics buy Lego figurines, replias of invisibility cloaks and wizard wands. Twihards (a/k/a those obsessed with the Twilight series) buy dolls, clothes, posters…heck, they probably even buy Twilight-themed sleeping bags.
Ergo, if the societal embrace of a movie or movement is defined by the creation of retail goods in its honor – then it’s no surprise that there’s a plethora of Facebook and Twitter “stuff” that folks buy, too.
There are silly items like Twitter-themed home goods, Twitter and Facebook inspired high tops, tee shirts and even a Twitter inspired notepad.
Some might find these items a little crazy, but there are some cool items out there as well. If you’re a woman (sorry guys!) and fond of the Twittersphere, you might consider buying a spiffy necklace from Survival of the Hippest featuring your Twitter handle — like the one regularly sported by our uber geek fearless leader, Shelly Kramer. (Aside: I keep waiting fo her to pony up and buy me one of of those doggone necklaces but, so far, she’s managed to keep me hanging. Rude, really. Especially in light of the fact that I’m her favorite daughter.)
Apps For Compiling Social Media Memories
And, in the “This is Cooler Than All That Other Crap” category, there are even apps for collecting your Facebook or Twitter memories, compiled from posts during a specific time period, and making them into a book. Now that, my friends, could be pretty sweet.
There’s OrBooks and their Tweets from Tahrir, which is a book that’s essentially a catalog of tweets from protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square who came together to fight for a better life.
Deutsche Post DHL developed Social Memories, an app for Facebook users that converts their online lives into a book.
With the Social Memories app you can focus on a particular time frame and it will aggregate all your posts during that time period, pulling out data like which friends you interactive with most often, words you used most often, zodiac signs of your most active friends and a lot of other random – and sometimes interesting – data. All of this data gets neatly organized and plopped into what can be as big as a 28 page book.
The other cool thing about this particular app is that when the book is initially created, you get to review it as a FREE, editable online document. You can change the color scheme of the cover, an interior page and/or switch out photos on any of the pages relating to your biggest or most popular albums. And, of course, if you love the book so much you want a professionally bound copy, you can get it for EUR 19, or roughly $28 dollars US, plus shipping.
I can think of a number of instances where an app like this might be really cool, especially if it were created around an event like a festival, college graduation, an engagement and subsequent wedding and honeymoon, a sporting event or conference. See, you’re tracking with me now. It might actually be a neat piece of memorabilia that a group of people might be interested in purchasing. It’s personalized, user-generated content at its best – and the price is certainly attractive.
With more than 750 million active users spending an excessive of 700 billion minutes on Facebook, it seems logical to refer to these streams of typically personal information to capture a snapshot of what is going on in a person’s life.
From a professional standpoint, if Social Memories allowed you to tailor the data aggregated in the book, this could be a unique way to showcase results from a Facebook specific social campaign.
For instance, we participated with a bunch of other foodies in Cabot Creamery’s Soup Swap event this past winter, and it was terrific. During the course of Cabot’s Soup Swap event, participants from all over the U.S> were making soup using Cabot products and posting recipes, comments and pictures on Cabot’s Facebook wall, as well as their own. This could not only be a fun and interesting way for a brand to collect data about a particular campaign, but to also memorialize it for future reference.
I’m sure there are lots of other uses – both personal and professional – for an app like this. What do you think? How could you use it? Would love to hear any ideas you have.