The Montoya Herald, a weblog about Blueprint, jQuery, design, music and life, publishing on the web since September 2005. Written by Christian Montoya: developer, designer and entrepreneur.

The Montoya Herald — ChristianMontoya.com

Search

Buy My DVD!

Like What I Do?

My Amazon.com Wish List

On this domain

Elsewhere

Scrapblog preview

Posted on March 24, 2007.

At the Refresh Miami meetup last Wednesday, I had the pleasure of seeing a presentation for Scrapblog, a cool new web app that's worth watching. Scrapblog is a close as one can get to making scrapbooks online, with the added value of music and videos making it twice as cool. Plus, the app itself one uses to create "scrapblogs" is Flash-powered, so there are a lot of customization options… think resizing and rotating video, for one. Here are some photos from the presentation by Carlos Garcia, CEO of Scrapblog:

Scrapblog presentation 1

That's the welcome screen, which you will be able to see when Scrapblog launches.

Scrapblog presentation 2

Scrapblog comes with a nice collection of ready-to-use themes, which can be customized completely by the user. The user can also start with a blank canvas and add in any elements from any theme. We're talking about a Virb level of customization here; the kind of customization all web services should allow!

Scrapblog presentation 3

You can see here features like adding photos, making borders and drawing shapes.

Scrapblog presentation 4

And here is a video imported from YouTube. Scrapblog is very API-friendly, so in this preview Carlos had access to a handful of photo networks (including Flickr) and YouTube, with other video-sharing sites on the way. You can also upload your own files, of course.

Now Scrapblog might be a waste of time for a busy guy like me, but I can definitely see someone like my little sister spending a lot of time with this app when it launches. She would probably make scrapblogs for her friends, her family, her dog and so forth, and then go back to MySpace and share them all there.

What I found very interesting in the end was that when asked if Carlos thought up the idea for Scrapblog after doing some market research or just as a personal idea, Carlos explained that he and his wife just saw a personal need for an app like Scrapblog and decided to make it happen. There was no need for expensive market research; he just knew that this app would be useful. It remains to be seen whether or not Scrapblog will stand the test of time, but I think we could all take notes from Carlos here; we are all users of the web, and we shouldn't have any difficulty deciding what the next useful app should be. All we have to do is evaluate our current needs and start there.

2 Comments

  1. alex on March 29, 2007

    Thank you for the mention, Christian, it was good to see you at Refresh.

  2. morganusvitus on April 5, 2007

    The site looks great ! Thanks for all your help ( past, present and future !)

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.