You can buy a book written by a blogger, you can buy a book made entirely of blog posts, now you can buy a book of your facebook timeline. What kind of story will yours tell? I recently had chance to play with SocialPics, the new photobook from Snapfish. It manages to achieve that Milton Waddams level of being both cool and odd at the same time.
To begin with it's not like a regular photo book, you don't get to choose page count or decoration, there is no hand selecting of pictures. You select whether you want hard or soft cover, determine the time span you want included, and the software pulls in everything covering those dates. It seems to be completely random, giving no preference to friends you interact with most often or friends you accepted and never interacted with again. It does not use any information from any of the Facebook apps, so will not tell you how many games of Words With Friends you are currently playing.
I set my parameters between January 2009 and the current date, to cover my life from the moment I found out I was pregnant with my first son. The program stalled at 87% and when I hit refresh I had to start over, it did not remember any of the information I had put in. The program popped up with a message letting me know that it was still in beta, this means that unlike most photobooks the book cannot be saved and later updated. You either do it in its entirety, in one sitting, or you start all over again.
I wasn't particularly happy with some of the comments that were being pulled in for my baby years and so when I restarted the upload I decided to set the timeline between my joining Facebook and December 2008, to cover life before kids. Apparently I didn't have enough of a life before kids and so I had to force the book to be created. I do often wonder what I did with my spare time before kids -- apparently nothing post worthy! The initial problem with this option is that friends who now set their current profile pictures to pictures of their adorable children will show the child and not them. Since my friends didn't have babies pre-2008, it's kind of deceptive. Makes me wonder if Zuckerberg didn't really intend for people to post their kids as their profile pictures? Perhaps even more importantly, when selecting an earlier date, you are given pictures of people that you are no longer friends with, at least in real life. If you have unfriended them on Facebook, they don't appear in your book, but it's not always that simple. There are those people you have quietly distanced yourself from, through feed settings and actual interaction, but have not "unfriended." Unwanted relatives also pop through in this way!
So finally, the book I decided to go for covered my dad's whole time on Facebook. I used his login and got a pretty wonderful book. Apparently he uses Facebook nicely, whereas I use it to tell people when I need to pee whilst in Panera Bread! The book pulled in some pretty wonderful pictures and some amazingly sweet status updates. Flicking through the book, I was almost completely happy with what it grabbed and only had to make a few tweaks. One of the advantages of the program is that you delete unwanted status updates and pictures. This does not, however, change the amount of pictures required by the program. If you have fifty friends and it requires fifty pictures, it will not delete when you ask it to but will simply re-shuffle. It is random and so it might take a while for you to make that unwanted friend appear in the smallest picture space. You can delete status updates, but then you also have to delete all subsequent comments otherwise you get strange half conversations in your book.
It is one of the quickest and quirkiest photobooks I have ever made, and I have made quite a few. For me, a mother of two small children, with friends and family in two countries, it's not exactly the best kind of book to get. There is one thing, however, that sprang instantly to mind when my book (using my dad's timeline) arrived and I got to thumb through it: high school graduation. This is the perfect graduation gift, it will compile a mini yearbook of your child's individual high school experience. You can wait until after graduation to have those photos pull in, or do it just before so they can have their friends sign it after graduation. Given the way high schoolers seem to use Facebook, it seems to me that they will get a huge kick out of seeing themselves in print in this way.
While the program is still in beta and a little quirky, it has great potential and I could easily see it becoming one of the top grad gifts in 2013. New features are being added all the time. In the time since I made my book and sat down to write this post, several have been added, including a choice of cover designs and the ability to change photo size.
I was provided with a SocialPics book to review for GeekMom.
