Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of facebook is not a scrapbooker at all. Or is he? I picked up Time’s Person of the Year issue because I love year-end lists and recaps like this issue. I was skeptical about their choice of Mark Zuckerberg as the person of the year and quickly came to the conclusion that he may not be a scrapbooker in the conventional sense, but he definitely encourages and facilitates the spirit of scrapbooking.
Several pages into the cover story on Zuckerberg, Lev Grossman writes:
“The fact that people yearned not to be liberated from their daily lives but to be more deeply embedded in them is an extraordinary insight, as basic and era-defining in its way as [Steve] Jobs’ realization that people prefer a graphical desktop to a command line or pretty computers to boring beige ones” (p. 61).
I’m not sure Zuckerberg is the first person to make this insight because this is something scrapbookers have been doing for years, but he sure has brought this insight to the masses. Facebook is a scrapbook. Facebook is a platform where you can tell your story and easily record other’s responses to your story. It’s a scrapbook in real-time. One limitation of using facebook as your core or only storytelling method is that the odds of you or anyone else going back through your whole profile to learn about you and your life are quite slim. What are your options:
Option One
In October 2010, facebook introduced a new tool where you can now download your facebook account for offline use. Click here to learn how. I’m still trying to figure out what exactly I might do with the data in this format. I could easily print it out on my home computer and get it bound in book form at an office supply store or do it myself with Cinch Book Bindery Tool
What if I just want my profile in book form? I don’t care if have a digital offline version. I want my tweets, too.
Option Two
Everything2print gives you the tools to retrieve all of your photos from facebook or tweets from twitter. Actually, you can add it all into one book! How cool would it be to print one of these books up periodically, say once a year? For $15.95, I could have a soft-cover book of all my facebook photos and tweets. You can edit the title on each page of photos and delete pages. As a scrapbooker, I would like to be able to do more personalization. I would also like the comments from the photos on facebook to be included next to the photos in the book. Despite this limitation, I think it is fabulous that you can now easily and affordably get a printed copy of these social network sites. My data won’t just get buried on a server somewhere…it will just get buried on my bookshelf in my house amongst all my other scrapbooks. Now, though, my daughter can easily learn about me through these sites without having to get on the computer and dig through bits of data.
Option Three
Blog2print is a service that allows you to easily print up a copy of your blog. Its main limitation is that it is for people using blogger, wordpress.com, or typepad. If I were creating a personal or family blog (or any other blog) on one of these platforms, I would so get a printed copy of it once a year. The books start at $14.95 for 20 pages (additional pages are 35 cents each).
Option Four
Blurb is the same concept as blog2print only it also supports LiveJournal in addition to blogger, typepad, and wordpress.com. It looks like you have more freedom on the finished product in terms of size compared to blog2print. Depending on the book size, your book’s base price would range from $2.95-$59.95.
Option Five
Social Safe is another option to backing up your social network sites. They have a free version and a pro version. I attempted to try out the free version, but had troubles getting the software to access my data. Maybe you will have better luck.
Option Six
Momento is an app and allows you to pull information from your social network sites and add additional information about your daily life.
Option Seven
Kelli Crowe just wrote a post on what she did with her facebook posts here. Basically, she copied and pasted her status updates into another document, cleaned it up a bit, and printed it out.
I have not used any of these companies to print my blog or social networking profile. Eventually, I would like to test each of these services. The point is that these social network sites are types of scrapbooks. The content we share is scrapworthy. Maybe you have no interest in your content offline, but I think it might be interesting to look at in the future in a printed form.
If you know of other companies with similar capabilities, please comment below. Also, if you have any experiences using any of these services, please comment below. If you have anything to say on this topic, please comment below. Thanks!
Stephanie Medley-Rath is a sociologist and scrapbooker who studies scrapbooking and memory keeping. Scrapworthy Lives is a blog focused on her sociological analysis of scrapbooking, with a sprinkling of posts about Stephanie's own scrapbooking projects.
