There’s a cottage industry of startups that want to sell your social networking content back to you in a new form, such as PastBook and Memolane. Loccit, a UK-based ecommerce startup which launched this summer after a spell in beta, is another example — allowing people to personalise a variety of physical products such as mugs and notebooks with photos culled from their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts.
Loccit‘s latest product — launched last Friday — is a personalised diary populated with photos and updates from the likes of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The startup says it sold 8,000 of these diaries in the first 48 hours of the product going on sale, which indicates there is an appetite for repackaging people’s digital footprint and selling it back to them in a more permanent form (in this case: paper — with a choice of hard or soft cover).
Loccit’s system is pretty rough round the edges — currently displaying a big warning to users that non-English characters won’t print correctly yet, and requesting they “please drop back in a week”. It can also be very slow to pull in content from social networks, if indeed it pulls it in at all — so it’s even more impressive they managed to flog 8,000 of the books in two days.
Loccit’s diary wizard lets you create books from friends’ social networking content as well as your own, but being able to pull in content from friends’ social accounts appears to depend on their privacy settings (in the case of your own Facebook account you have to grant Loccit’s app access to your profile and news feed).
Once you manage to negotiate its systems, and generate your personalised social media diary, the finished product looks a little something like this
