Addicted to Facebook? Can’t get enough? Perhaps wondering what happens to all of those interactions and photos and comments if one day Facebook goes away? Or would just like a more ‘permanent’ version of it all?
You’re in luck. A 3rd-party developer has created a Facebook app called EgoBook that creates a real hard-copy book based on your Facebook profile. I created my very own EgoBook (courtesy of the developer) to see how it turned out.
After placing my order, the my EgoBook showed up within a week nicely protected with bubble wrap. My first thoughts were that it was smaller and thinner than I had imagined it would be, but that was just my imagination as the order page really didn’t give me a good idea of how large it would be.
The EgoBook is a bit smaller than a standard 8.5×11″ page. It has a glossy cover and nice decently-thick matte pages. The avatars and reproduced photos within were of very good quality – better than I thought they would be.
The final 2 pages were dedicated to my top commenters and a photo collage of my friends’ profile pics.
I had a number of issues, however, with the order page and its interface. My recommendation to the developer is to just throw out what they have currently and start over with a rockstar Facebook UI developer.
For example, the choices on the order page were hard to understand (there should be pop-up examples of what each of them mean); the choose buttons didn’t seem to do anything.
There needs to be more consideration for both American and European audiences – for example, print the $ sign at the start and the dates using 3-letter shortened form for the month, instead of the sometimes ambiguous but definitely confusing mm/dd/yyyy OR dd/mm/yyyy!
There should be an option to automatically decide the features based on the price the user wants to pay. Ex: what do I get if I choose $35? Pricing is normally based on how many pages your book turns out to be.
For the cover photo, you should have the option to omit it or choose any picture from your photos, not only from your Profile pics.
Unfortunately, you can’t get any status updates prior to June 2009 (Facebook limitation).
And remember that if you’re paranoid about security, EgoBook needs access to your profile to pull down status messages and photos in order to put together the book.
For the most part, I was quite pleased with the finished product. My main complaints were with the ordering page and its interface. Overall, this is an idea that you would think that Facebook themselves would have come up with, and quite possibly still may, but until then, you can have an EgoBook.
(Disclaimer: Gizmos for Geeks received a complimentary review copy of this product.)