Keepsy – The Gift Photo Album For Facebook Enthusiasts

Facebook fans can now give a digital scrapbook for their friends' birthdays

Facebook has become truly popular. This is great for people who love social networking and want to share pretty much everything they run across with their friends. For people who don’t like all this, Facebook’s popularity is not so pleasant.That’s because if you happen to have an account due to eventually being convinced by your friends that you need one, on nearly every site you visit you’ll be asked to “like it”, share it and more. This article is about an additional service for Facebook so if you’re not a fan, this article is probably not for you.

Mashable has a spark of genius series through which it presents a unique feature of startups and in this particular case, all the talk is about a platform called Keepsy which will allow Facebook friends to contribute to scrapbooks for group gifts. The idea behind this is simple. It’s a sort of equivalent of a birthday card but on Facebook. Usually all that people bother to do on the social networking site is to flood a user’s wall with “hey, happy birthday!”. If you happen to have a lot of friends, you know fairly well that you’ll just read the first two and assume that the rest said happy birthday as well. Keepsy aims to deliver an alternative for birthdays on Facebook. It offers a collaborative album-making platform which was launched on December 15.

Say someone wanted to make a scrapbook for someone’s birthday. It’d be easy for them to invite other friends on Facebook to contribute and create pages by using Facebook photos, text tools and a bunch of templates that are already provided by the service. Wondering which of your friends are that person’s friends? After all, you wouldn’t want to invite a person who has nothing to do with the birthday boy/girl. Well, the platform will let you know which friends are mutual if you select a creator (you) and a recipient (the birthday Facebooker in question). When other friends chose to create their own pages they can even choose to contribute for a group gift which will consist of either a hardcover physical version of the book that can be had for a decently low price of $29.99 or an Amazon gift card.

Now digital scrapbooking in itself or gathering people to contribute for a gift have all been done before. The latter has been around forever and before most people practically moved to the Internet, they used to do the same in real life by invading stores and trying to decide which gift was more appropriate. At that point, the more friends you had the harder it was to decide because chances were each of the friends had completely different opinions on what to buy. The thing about Keepsy is that it’s probably the first company to combine the two. If you’re part of that category I’ve just mentioned, with a lot of undecided friends all pulling in different directions, offering a scrapbook as a gift is something most people will agree with. Gathering photos to complete a scrapbook isn’t very hard either because all photos are already available on your favorite social networking site.

As Mashable reports, one of the major challenges for Keepsy’s co-founders Peter Weck and Blake Williams was that their first product happens to be a birthday album. That means that the virtual gift should be kept a secret, at least until the birthdate of the person who is to receive it comes up. This means that all talk about the gift should be kept private between the friends who are contributing to it. Keepsy, for this particular reason, won’t communicate through public wall posts or in any other way that might reel in new people but at the same time ruin the surprise. As Williams mentioned, expanding to new types of albums like class yearbooks and wedding albums is the company’s first priority. Another plan involves adding more gift card relationships much like the one they’ve already set up with Amazon. Keepsy will most likely make money from this as well as the actual physical albums.

Several angel investors such as Dave McClure, James Hong, Tim Connors and others all believe that this idea has a lot of potential and to prove it they’ve reportedly invested a total of $1.1 million in two rounds of funding. We’re now here to ask you whether you think this is a good idea? Would you be tempted to gather up several friends to offer such a gift to someone important in your life whose birthday is coming up? Would you stick to the online version or would you actually consider raising some money to give that person an actual physical scrapbook? While I’m not personally tempted by this, I’ll have to admit that this kind of service will prove quite interesting for the type of person who spends a lot of hours each day on Facebook, uploading photos and keeping in touch with friends.

Other things you need to know? We’ve taken the liberty of reproducing how the service works from the Keepsy website. First off you’ll need to choose a friend. Secondly you’ll need to make a page by using photos as well as art. The next step is to invite friends to make their own pages. Finally, you get to pitch-in to buy a printed album and a gift card. It’s not complicated at all and any person will be able to make a scrapbook in a very limited amount of time. We don’t know about scrapbook shipping yet but this might be a good idea if you discover quite late that a friend’s birthday is coming up and you haven’t even started searching for a gift.11