DigitalBeat

Online photo service Pixable, which lets you print albums from your Facebook content, is launching its Calendar Creator feature today. The new feature will let you print out calendars to remember important dates from your information stored on Facebook, which is where many of us now have all of our photos (Facebook claims more than 2 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month).

Facebook’s birthday reminders have turned all of us into those great friends who never forget a birthday. But “since Facebook did a platform change, people have to work harder to find birthdays,” says Pixable’s co-founder and COO, Andres Blank. So the company’s betting there’s a market for printable calendars.

Pixable pulls data directly from users’ Facebook accounts, allowing you to choose between all Facebook content, Facebook albums, and tagged people. Using the Facebook API, it automatically extracts all of the information stored in Facebook and then lets you edit as you wish, so you can decide whether to include those Facebook “friends” you have never actually spoken to.

The automated fill-in process makes for a much faster calendar creation process than what you could accomplish with Pixable’s rivals, such as KodakGallery, Shutterfly, and Snapfish. Not only do these services lack the ability to upload dates from Facebook, but they also don’t allow you to upload photos en masse — instead you have to upload pictures one by one. With Pixable, says Bank, you can have a completely populated calendar in about five minutes.

Personera, a new startup out of South Africa, similarly connects to Facebook, but doesn’t allow for the same degree of customization, only allowing for either all or no birthdays or birthdays based on an existing Facebook friend list, although Personera’s interface is somewhat cleaner and easier to use

Pixable’s calendar creation process is extremely simple: it only takes a few clicks and costs less than $20. Just log in via Facebook connect, choose a size (desk or wall calendar), and decide whether to include profile pictures with the other photos.

After uploading friends’ data, Creator asks you to choose a background theme and cover photo and confirm the dates you want to remember, which entails selecting the friends you’d like to include for photos and/or birthdays, public holidays, and “customized dates.” You can add religious holidays and zodiac signs as well as birthdays of friends who are not on Facebook in addition to the standard American holidays Pixable provides

Pixable lets you move thumbnails around on the cover of the calendar, but it’s not clear where those pictures are coming from or that you’d want all of your friends profile pictures on your calendar. The design elements are somewhat limited, but the Calendar Creator could be useful for paring down lists, ie college friends or an anniversary calendar, and then sending it to a select group of people, since you can also select pictures with only certain people tagged.

Pixable’s soft launch was in July 2009 with a public release in October of this year. The company is located in New York and has raised $350,000 from angel investors, including Edward Roberts (the director of the MIT Entrepreneurship center), Freddy Kerrest (founder of Saasure) and Spain’s Grupo Intercom. Users need to have a Facebook account to use Pixable, which limits its target audience but allows Pixable to pull from Facebook’s enormous information database and metadata.

Blank says Pixable’s goal is to “become top-of-mind when it comes to photos and social networks.” Pixable’s public release was in October and since then, over 5,000 albums have already been created. Judging by the importance of both birthday reminders and photos on Facebook, Pixable may be heading in the right direction.

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