A DHL Book Review: Social Memories.

The Social Memories of Jakob Montrasio.

Review

Today my "Social Memories" book arrived. It's a new book service that DHL offers. The Facebook application diggs thru your Facebook account and creates a book based on a timeframe that you can edit and ships it to you.

The Quality

You are able to choose between different languages, different colors and you can replace pictures that were chosen with other ones within the same image set that they come from. You can not, and this is where I am a bit disappointed, change whole pages or areas against other ones. I hope this will be changed in the future and become more flexible as the service hopefully gets extended.

The book comes in a hardcover and has a very good quality and feel to it. The paper of the pages feels strong and good, too, all in all quite a decent quality. I hated the photo book that I got thru Apple's iPhoto some years ago and expected this to be on that level, but it was much better than that.

It has 24 pages full of web 2.0 styled diagrams, informations and photos. For the crappy quality that the Facebook pictures are in, they look pretty neat printed in the book, I have to say. They are never really big, but quite sharp and good in color.

Suggestions

I share a lot of links on Facebook, and my friends seem to like those a lot. There isn't any clear entry about this in the book, though. Would be cool to have a single or double page listing the most frequented links and some of the comments that were added to those.

Another suggestion for future updates of the service is to add more text. There are so many info graphics and - imho - useless facts... I'd replace at least a third of them with something else, like my 5 most commented status updates or something. It would also be awesome to be able to print some of the replies under it. Actually, to have comments from other people regarding your entries is completely missing. This would be a sweet update. Or to have it sorted by months, and to have the most commented status update for each month... To have only one is a bit little.

Last request: To be able to print photos at a bigger size! It would make sense to offer users to upload the same photos with a higher resolution, to replace the low quality ones. This way you could print gorgeous full-page photos.

Final Verdict

Still, this is a new and cool service and if you use Facebook a lot, it's a very interesting and quite useful way to backup your social memories onto paper.

In a perfect world, this book would not only integrate Facebook, but also my Twitter feed, my flickr photos, my last.fm music listings, and, and, and. But I guess now I'm dreaming ahead too far?

Create your own book here: http://www.facebook.com/socialmemories