

Snailmail Photos To Friends With Facebook’s New Postcards Feature - derpenxyne
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/09/facebook-postcards/

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plusbryan
Hey, Bryan from Sincerely here. If you want a similar integration with your
app or service, we have a simple web api: <http://dev.sincerely.com>

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lewisflude
Looks pretty awesome! Can you give me some use cases?

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plusbryan
Ship API literally just launched, so the sky's the limit. Mailing a postcard
is as simple as hitting two methods (upload and create). After running
Sincerely for a little over a year, we've definitely witnessed how meaningful
getting something in the mail can be.

Our Ship Library partners have done some interesting stuff:
<http://dev.sincerely.com/partners>

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JoeCortopassi
Still don't know why Facebook doesn't sell collated physical photo albums. I
would without a doubt order ones for my wedding, multiple of our kids birth
and birthdays (for grandparents as presents), along with other special events
like graduations. You and your friends already upload the best pictures from
these events to Facebook, just give me a way to select 20-30 and place them in
a template to be printed and mailed.

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subpixel
I'm not sure of the resolution at which FB stores photos. At any rate I don't
think it's standard practice for people to upload originals in the first
place. So large scale printing might not be that simple.

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plusbryan
Max they store is 2048px on a side, which is plenty for a 4x6 print. That
doesn't mean that all of Facebook's photos are stored at this resolution, as I
believe the max size was increased relatively recently.

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kjw
While I haven't personally printed a photo in the past decade, the market is
surprisingly large for photo printing services. A new revenue stream could be
quite meaningful to Facebook as their ad revenue slows -- in 2011, Facebook
did $3.7B in revenue while Shutterfly did $473M in revenue.

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brlewis
Oh yeah, Facebook keeps enough resolution now to make acceptable postcards.
Now if they would just keep basic metadata, they'd be an acceptable import
source for all kinds of other services.

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ct0
What a great way to get addresses!

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nnancy
Some people just have to look at everything negatively

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kalleboo
Does anyone use "postcards" features? I've seen this on cell phones since
about 2003 when they started getting cameras, but I've never heard of anyone
ever sending or receiving one.

