Remember that time in high school when you got in a Facebook chat war with Rachel Berkowitz over whether or not you told everyone that she got finger-banged by Justin Goldman at Alexa Rosenwinkel’s party (yeah, I went to a predominantly Jewish high school, what of it)? Now, you can commit that exchange to posterity with Memeoirs, a book-making service that turns your late-night emails and Facebook chats, and Gchat convos into literary gold.
(Cards on the table, that promo made me cry a little bit. Whatever, I’m a sucker for old people casting affectionate looks at each other).
For $40 to print a paperback and $60 to print a hardcover, the Povo, Italy-based service prints a book of your Facebook or email conversations. Simply log into the service with your Facebook, Gmail, or Outlook account and select the contact whose conversations you’d like to include in the book, as well as the time period when the exchanges took place. The finished product can be anywhere between 30 and 450 pages, depending on how many messages you’d like to include.
Judging by the testimonials from married couples who fell in love via email on their website, Memeoirs views couples as their target audience. But you can pretty much include any email exchanges you want in the book, without worrying about prying eyes peeking at your correspondences: The service is totally automated.
This isn’t the first time that a startup has tried to collect all of your social media messages into a book—the now-defunct Book of Fame service did the same thing with Facebook status updates—but Memeoirs seems to have much higher aspirations. By converting mundane, everyday online exchanges into elegant typeface prose, the startup appears to be trying to elevate digital exchanges to the form of epistolary novel, a genre that was popular in the eighteenth century.
Whether our Facebook chats will become the 21st-century version of Clarissa (or even The Perks of Being a Wallflower, natch) remains to be seen. But if your interest is piqued by the idea of transferring your late-night cyber sessions with your long-distance college boyfriend onto the page, Memeoirs is launching a 25 percent off sale for one week only until March 21, so start dredging up those convos today.
H/T PSFK | Photo by rillian remix by Jason Reed (CC BY-SA 2.0)
