Convert your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, all into a physical journal | Hacker News Reader

Convert your Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, all into a physical journal

myscribr.com

35 pointsbenjlang29 comments

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Founder of Scribr here. We're stoked to see this on HN and curious to see what the minds here think of it.

TheNextWeb has a good article detailing our book here:

http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/12/30/scribr-preserves-your-...

We also have Timeline-esque features that aren't very public at the moment. We delve into these in our blog here:

http://blog.myscribr.com/post/15036430644

Seems like an amazing idea, can't wait for it to come out.

I love this but I would love it even more if it would support Wordpress. I migrated my old Livejournal (I know...) to Wordpress so it's like a record of my past ten years at this point. It'd be fantastic to have all of that as a physical item.

Blog support is a top-priority next feature for us.

Great news, blogs are where people express themselves - my feeds definitely wouldn't be interesting to me.

Yeah, arbitrary RSS support would be cool.

I was also thinking if you could integrate with Daily Mile (which I use) or services like that, that could be really interesting. I have some memorable bike rides in there.

Some reasons why this may not be a great idea: * No one really reads their own posts afterwards. * The crap you write on facebook is for others - ie, rarely deep enough to keep for yourself.

One place I think you could make money: New Parents.

These guys post pics of their kids all the time and text. Grab all that put it into a book. I think that would be very easy for a new parent to do (because they already do it) and very valuable. It would be 0 effort for parents which I'm sure they would appreciate. Otherwise they'd have to download all the pics and then make a book adn add text etc ...

To a degree, we want to capture both the deep meaningful thoughts and the inane daily business, to capture a whole picture of someone. It's interesting seeing how little things (a check-in, say) can trigger associated memories for the reader.

That said, there are certainly a number of people who fill their social networks with crap, and just don't care about it. For them, we have the option of omitting services from the book, and as we add more blogging platforms the value may increase.

We also encourage users to keep a journal within Scribr itself via our nightly email, which makes the process super-easy.

New parents are definitely a target market for us, we have a few in our Alpha group and we're finding they're really into it.

I would definitely focus on your happiest customer. And its not like they will ever go away.

The backlash from people saying "Hmmm it seemed like a good idea at the time but I really dont want to pay $20 bucks for a bunch of my 3 line posts" could be considerable.

Also just targetting one market well is a lot of work for a startup.

Anyway best of luck - its great to see you have deeply engaged customers - that to my mind is the holy grail of an early stage startup.

Best of luck.

I saw the headline on this article and thought "Oh my god, that's such an awesome idea." Great example of one of those "So obvious, why didn't I think of that?" ideas.

I was reading through the site and really liked it. I'm not sure if I'm the exact target market, but I really liked what I saw. I was about to back out when I saw your nightly email thing, which is what convinced me to sign up (can't wait for my invite!).

Great idea, can't wait to try it out.

I like this idea. I already keep a notebook/journal, and I've started writing more frequently on my blog, but so much of what I do that's memorable goes onto Facebook or Twitter (not so much Foursquare, but maybe if I was recording it for posterity in a book, I might be more interested in using Foursquare).

I think the key is being able to easily select and exclude entries from being included. I doubt I would want links I post on Twitter in such a book, or most @reply conversations.

Sounds like a great idea, especially in light of the year's end.

Who prints your books?

We use Lulu, they've been absolutely great to work with.

Scribr makes me think of Scribd. Otherwise great idea. I thought of this a few years ago, but never followed through with it. Glad to see someone is doing it! Left my email.

There was also http://www.blogbinders.com/ that made a go at the same idea ~8 years ago. Sadly they didn't survive.

Looks like a interesting idea. Would be cool if you could incorporate YouTube into it as well. YouTube is my primary Social Network (http://YouTube.com/Urgo) where I did a video a day for a whole year may 2010-may 2011 and still make a couple vlogs a week. If that could be tied in as well with my twitter, flickr & foursquare I think I'd be sold into trying it out :) I signed up for a beta invite.

Not sure how we'd print YouTube, a flipbook maybe? :)

You can still put the title & description of the video in plus the thumbnails (youtube generates 4. 3 intervals + a partner/primary one) and a QR code to link to watch the video :)

Absolutely, was mostly joking about the flipbook. Mostly.

We definitely want to add the services that people are using. YouTube wasn't high on our list but you make a good point about vloggers, it might have to get bumped up the priorities a bit.

Awesome, thanks :) I run a community of daily vloggers on youtube so perhaps if it turns out well others will be interested too. Hope you can get it added soon. Would love to check it out. Feel free to contact me.

Eh, I don't know how big of a selling point Youtube would be. For vloggers, the journal-like content is IN the video and you'd have no way of getting to that. Having just a title and timestamp wouldn't be that interesting in book form.

Even after Scribr, Facebook, Twitter and the Internet itself are gone.

I like how this is presented as if it is a certainty such a day will come to pass :)

I think its a pretty solid bet. I mean when's the last time you posted to your neighborhood BBS, or on aol. Remember geocities or even myspace (though its still there, who really uses it, really). You can't even get access to your own older tweets.

Oh, sure, Twitter and Facebook will probably go away. I was mostly looking at the inclusion of the Internet.

We figure it'll happen someday. Of course, it may be centuries in the future when the roach kings rule, and our paperback book may not last that long.

I love the idea of having a physical copy of all this information. The art of printmaking has certainly become a lost art.

A blogger friend of mine would love this, great gift idea.

How's the pricing going to work?

This would be a great gift idea but it would be hard to make it a surprise.

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