HotPrints, the photo application that lets you create, print and send albums from your existing images on Facebook, is revealing new themes with its updated offerings. The two new themes are the Family Memories Book and the Baby Book. These are both family-oriented photobooks, aimed at a demographic different from the themes HotPrints started out with. HotPrints is also adding Holiday- and Travel-themed options as well.
The application itself is easy enough to use: select a theme for your photobook, choose the friends’ albums you’d like to pull content from, and pick the photos you’d like to include in the book itself. Names and dates are automatically pulled for your photobook, and the images are formatted accordingly.
Editing options include photo arrangement and order, borders and other graphic changes, and more. Photobooks can then be shared virtually, or sent to a recipient’s home. You don’t need to know your friend’s address in order to send them a book: the application will get the address from them through the Facebook application, enabling this social network to ac as a medium that protects private information while extending physical content sharing options.
When HotPrints launched, the themes available included a Greetings photobook, multiple themes for parties and friends, among others. Adding family-centric themes to HotPrints means that the company is extending its support for various types of users, and seeking a new portion of the market.
Reaching out to family-centric users on Facebook can be good for a number of reasons, especially since photobooks can be printed and sent to the creator or their other Facebook friends, typically for under $4.00. While this is a good price point for just about any user on Facebook, it’s often easier to justify paying for a photobook when it’s for a family member. If a parent is avid enough to upload photos of their babies, they’re likely avid enough create a photobook from the existing photos and have them sent to other family members, right?
The move may also be a useful effort to help HotPrints regain some of the growth it’s lost in the past couple of weeks. Looking at the stats for HotPrints, the Facebook application has seen a steady decline after a sharp drop in traffic earlier this month. While this decline likely has little to do with the backlash Facebook witnessed after changing its Terms of Service regarding the question of who owns content posted on Facebook, HotPrints and its application does touch on this issue and could be affected by it on a given level.
HotPrints, in a sense, addresses the question of who owns content shared on Facebook head-on, by empowering users to re-purpose their content and share it in the tangible sense. Promoting the application as such has been a good angle for HotPrints and this is merely reiterated with the new family themes launching today.
