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
Looks pretty awesome! Can you give me some use cases?
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.
Been aware of Sincerely for a while (though haven't been dealing in photos so no cause to use it). Headline made me think this was going to be a Sherlocking, pleasantly surprised to see that's far from the case. Nice catch!
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.
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.
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.
Home photo albums usually hold 4"x6" photos, if I remember correctly. Most of the pictures in Facebook's lightbox view, are displayed above this on my 15" MBP without a problem. Should be ok resolution wise
They used to. Back in 2007 I remember ordering some of my facebook photos as physical prints. Not sure what happened to that.
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.
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.
What a great way to get addresses!
Some people just have to look at everything negatively
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.