The Jason Salas Experience

On the day before Thanksgiving, I was using Twitter's web interface (which, coincidentally, I rarely use these days), when I discovered a curious link to TweetBookz in the vaunted right column. Investigating, I found an online service that cleverly archives a user's microblogging history, assembles the data in a printed form and prepares it as a personalized book, suitable as a gift. I instantly found it to be intuitively clever and full of potential, if not overtly innovative.

Showing it off to several friends in the past couple of days IRL and via numerous tweets I've authored, I've found it to be quite polarizing. People either fall head-over-heels for it, or don't get it at all. But people are talking about it.

Here's 7 Questions with Tweetbookz co-founder Jacob Shwirtz:

1. Describe how Tweetbookz came to be and what gave rise to this service.

We spend a lot of time thinking about and being active within social media on behalf of our clients, such as Zagat Survey (check out @ZagatBuzz). As a result, we started imagining what it would be like if Twitter were an “offline” thing and what it would be like to treat Twitter as a book. From there the idea evolved into something more like a book of poetry or inspiration quotes, as opposed to a full archive. We thought it would be very fun to have your favorite tweets in a beautiful book on your coffee table, so that’s the idea we ran with.

2. What's your sales pitch and what counterargument would you lob at someone who says "this is just for people too lazy to print"?

People seldom think about their history on Twitter and go back to see the things they wrote a week, month or year ago. Our books are a fun and nostalgic way to reminisce about those things. It's less about narcissism, as some may think, and more about nostalgia.

We’re giving permanence to something so ephemeral and from that comes a cool, unique and unexpected product.

3. What logistical setup are you using to take orders, bind and ship books to users?

We partnered with a world-class on-demand book binding house in New York and they fulfill all our orders. Like this we focus on our specialty of building and marketing excellent web sites and they focus on their specialty of printing, binding and shipping.

4. Obviously, the operation is very lean, using the Twitter API. Are you planning on similar services with other social networks?

The beauty of Twitter is its 140-character limit. Because of that, we were able to invest in beautifully designed books that have templates which we know will never be exceeded. Obviously there are several additional concerns when printing something like blogs, because the length can vary so wildly. This has to do with our desire to create great-looking, specific products, as opposed to full archives that would look like encyclopedias or “white pages.”

5. The natural primary buying audience seems to be active Twitterers, with people not on that platform being the natural recipients. Have you found this to be so?

Actually, our initial vision was about 50/50 split between two groups. One group was gift-givers (whether or not they themselves are on Twitter) - people who buy gift certificates for active Twitter users in their lives. The other group was people buying the books as keepsakes for themselves. We envision people thinking more about what they tweet now because they know they’ll be able to get it in a book.

For example, imagine tweeting the process of your wife’s pregnancy and then printing a book that reports on that wonderful life-moment. It's really too early to tell exactly what people will do but we’re really curious to see!

6. Can we get books assembled only of original tweets, exclusive of replies?

Right now we will populate the book with a user’s last 200 tweets. Using a basic “delete” feature, users can remove any tweets they don’t want printed. When they delete a tweet we will loads additional ones from Twitter in order to maximize the 200 pages of the book. In this way people can completely curate the content of the book. In the near future we plan to unveil other, more advanced, editing tools and filters, such as automatically removing all tweets with hashtags, links, and/or replies.

7. What are some immediate and future plans for Tweetbookz?

We are working hard on additional editing tools to let people create their perfect books. Also, we hope to let users upload their own custom cover designs and maybe some more personalization options around the books.

Thanks Jacob, and best of luck!

// posted by Jason Salas @ 2:24 PM