The launch of Winkiwoo

We’re pretty excited about the launch of Winkiwoo, the first Facebook Application to let you intuitively and quickly built a high quality photobook or statusbook using your Facebook photos, and those of your friends. 

Winkiwoo is the first Facebook application in the world to allow you to easily design a photobook using your Facebook photos and those of your friends.

Winkiwoo is being soft-launched through Living Social Australia, with a $2 20-page photo book delivered anywhere worldwide for $4.99.

If you know much about how well $29 photobooks sell through deals websites and you consider that there has never been a way to print your Facebook photos and that Facebook is by-far the world’s largest depository of photos, you’ll appreciate just how significant both the application and the launch deal will be.

And this is just the beginning of the journey of Winkiwoo.

 

A bit about the application

Credit for the application goes to our client; it is an awesome idea and one we collectively believe is going to explode globally.

All we can claim credit for its, the application itself and how it has been designed and built.

Firstly and simply to reiterate the point, this is the first Facebook application in the world to allow you to print a photobook using your Facebook photos.

Secondly, where every existing photobook application is either built in Flash or an .exe, Winkiwoo has been built in HTML4; it not only works beautifully in Internet Explorer 7, it works on the iPad. Drag and drop and all.

The application is incredibly fast and incredibly intuitive.

If you have ever built a photobook using traditional photobook applications, you’ll know just how painful the process is.

Putting aside that you have to organise a find your photos on your hard drive, the process of building the photobook is laborious and painful.

Astonishingly, 80% of people that commence building a photobook through the traditional applications, fail to complete the process.

With Winkiwoo however, a book can be built and ready to order in just 30 seconds. A really high-quality, high-gloss book. (Trust me, Facebook photos print really well.)

Users will probably want to spend more time curating their books, though the speed with which a book can be built from ground-up is a testament to the application.

It is worth mentioning that in addition to photobooks, you can also create what is known as a statusbook: a high-quality record/print-out of your statuses (or those of your friends) for whatever date range you choose.

Whilst the statusbook might be missed on some of us, serious Facebookers (i.e. millions and millions of users) use their Facebook status as a timeline of their life. (This is why the Facebook timeline concept is soon to be released.)

Statuses are like our diaries of old and having a printed version lets us create a diary of what we have done and who we have interacted with over time.

 

 

 

 

Key takeout’s from the application

There are a few key takeout’s from the application.

The first is speed. We should all know that speed has a direct correlation with the commercial performance of any website and application.

From the interface to the underlying technical infrastructure, Winkiwoo is very fast.

The second is robustness.

Winkiwoo is a global application and is designed from ground-up to withstand enormous spikes of traffic.

We are contacted almost daily by companies that have built applications and competitions on Facebook only to watch them smashed to smithereens. There is an art to developing highly efficient applications designed to scale efficiently and beautifully and Winkiwoo is one of them.

The third is usability.

I appreciate that usability is obvious in any website or application, though it is especially so in what could be the complex process of finding, sorting, laying out and curating Facebook photos in a Facebook application roughly 560 pixels across.

Streamline and streamline until you have a simple, beautiful and fast process.

Well done to everyone at Winkiwoo and Wiliam who has worked on the project. Some serious hours have been invested and without the incredibly efforts of Nat, Josh, Mark, Edwin, Matt and many others in the Wiliam team, we wouldn’t have the Winkiwoo application we are so proud to launch.