Scrapblog preview

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:

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

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!

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

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.