Social Archivist

PRESS RELEASE January 1, 2011

Ever wished you could keep all your Facebook status updates as a real diary? Now you can. Launched on January 1, 2011, Like This Book is a real book version of your Facebook wall.

Founder Rachel Cunliffe came up with the idea after the birth of her first child two years ago.

“I used to keep a diary but now I write a status update.

“Even if I have fool-proof back-ups of my status updates on my computer or online, that doesn’t leave me a user-friendly way to reminisce over my life or leave something for my kids to flip through one day. Life on the internet is geared for right now and often not for the distant future.”

Rachel knew she wasn’t the only person feeling this way and started working on a semi-automated service which creates a physical diary rich with photos, comments and memories.

And that service is quick and easy to use. All you need to do is use Facebook’s download button, securely send your files and then preview and purchase your book.

Like This Book launched January 1, 2011 at http://www.likethisbook.com/ and http://www.facebook.com/likethisbook

Books are priced from $14.95US, tax and shipping additional.

Rachel Cunliffe is a blog and community site designer at http://www.cre8d-design.com/

In October, Facebook finally enabled downloading of your Facebook content. I strongly urge you to make a back up, even if you don’t plan to do anything else with it.  If your Facebook account is hacked or deleted somehow, you can always have a copy of your friends list, old status updates, photos etc.

To make the backup:

1. In Facebook, click on Account then Account Settings
2. Click on learn more next to Download your information
3. Enter your password and click Continue
4. Complete Facebook’s security check and then click Download now

Note: Sometimes you have to wait for Facebook to send you an email with a link and sometimes you will be able to download the file immediately.

An alternate way to archive all your old Facebook activity is this new Firefox extension: Archive Facebook. Basically what it does is save you the hassle of going to your profile page, scrolling to the bottom and clicking “Older posts” over and over again until you get right back to when you first joined Facebook (and yes, I have done this in the past!).

From that, you could either just print it or convert this massive webpage into a PDF file and then print that. It’s not the most user-friendly of extensions as you need to leave your browser to do all the archiving and can’t browse the net at the same time as it’s doing the archiving but it is another way of getting a record of your Facebook wall posts, status updates, photos (albeit thumbnails), comments and the like.

I tested this and just archived the last six months of my Facebook page and ended up with a 74 (!) page PDF. A special print stylesheet would make this much more suitable for printing and greatly reduce the number of pages required.

Print Your Twitter is a handy little tool for doing just that.

You can easily delete tweets you don’t want in your archive, filter by keyword and optionally also include your friends’ tweets. The bit I liked the most is that it automatically pulled in my twitpics into the page:

If you’re looking for a really quick way to print off all your Tweets without having any control over the design or format, try Tweetbook.

It only takes a few minutes before your own PDF file is ready for printing.

Here’s how a page in mine looked:

This looks promising: Twiary is a soon-to-be-launched service that will use your Twitter-account to “create something really beautiful”.