Facebook has been all over the news of late as excitement mounts about its imminent flotation.

The coverage reminded me that a tip of the hat is due to the team at Moo, for successfully securing a groundbreaking deal with the social media giant for Moo's new Facebook Cards offering.

When reading this news I was struck by a couple of things. The new service has kicked off with a sweetener whereby 200,000 Facebook users will get 50 Facebook Cards for free.

By applying some relatively rudimentary maths this results in a figure of ten million free business cards, by anyone's estimation that's quite a lot.

Having tried the service out I can see that Moo is tempting those free customers into spending some actual cash, for example by opting for the Express Shipping option or the addition of a showcase business card holder. Still, I'm sure lots of folk, like me, will stick with the freebie.

I also wondered how the new service would kick off, because if even a tiny percentage of Facebook's circa 845m users tried to order (and the Moo Facebook Cards offering is available worldwide) then it could easily cause an overload of spectacular proportions. Perhaps that's why the launch was relatively low-key. So low-key, in fact, it took me more than an hour to find it. Not helped by the fact that if you search for 'Facebook Cards' in Facebook itself, the page that comes up has nothing whatsoever to do with the Moo variant. 

If you fancy trying it, the Moo site itself is rather more helpful. Instructions on how to action Facebook Cards can be found here. And I see that the Moo Cards app shows up as having 150,000 active monthly users now. That's not to be sniffed at.

Moo is certainly in an aggressive growth phase. Turnover jumped 50% in the year to December 2010 to ?8m and it posted a small profit. It also recently added a new 'Luxe' business card option printed on swanky Mohawk Superfine 600gsm stock featuring a coloured layer sandwiched between white outers. Want 50 of these cards? That'll be ?23.99.

The Facebook deal has the potential to bring Moo's engagingly trendy print offering to the attention of many millions more potential customers. While the eyes of the world are on the Facebook IPO, I'm actually more interested to see what Moo does next.

Moo's motto is 'we love to print'. Which reminds me, it's Valentine's Day tomorrow so time to think about cards of a different nature.