Today we’re very pleased to introduce the Tabblo Print Toolkit, a set of technology components that produce great-looking printed pages from existing web content.

When we talk to people about their experiences printing web pages, we hear a lot of frustration. They don’t get the content they want, it doesn’t fit well on the page, space is poorly used, and so on. When people think of printing the web, they think of waste and ugliness. It doesn’t have to be that way.

The Tabblo Print Toolkit gives web developers a simple way to extract content from their pages, and have it reformatted to print beautifully. Our servers lay out your HTML using professionally-designed templates to give your users PDF files that look great.

We think TPT can dramatically improve the printed web. From our experience creating books and posters at Tabblo.com, we know that just because content starts on the web, doesn’t mean it can’t be beautiful on paper.

Today’s release is a first beta, but already produces impressively rendered pages from your existing HTML. Give the Tabblo Print Toolkit a try, and let us know what you think of the new world of the printed web.

A couple of weeks ago, HP unveiled its “Print 2.0” strategy and gave more detail about how publishers can take advantage of the Tabblo Print Toolkit, which will be introduced at the end of June. While the announcement received wide press attention (see the coverage below), we’d like to go into a little more depth about what “Print 2.0” means and why Web publishers should care about it.

In the last few years there has been a huge leap forward from presenting static web pages to allowing consumers to personalize when, where and how they consume content. As I traverse the web, I can now choose which information I want (the latest entry from a favorite blog), how I want it presented (an RSS feed), and a device for reading it (a smart phone). But print on the web hasn’t kept pace with this innovation, and it limits what I can do with the huge explosion of valuable content that’s now available to print on demand. HP thinks people are ready for a better solution.

The bottom line is that the print experience on the Web right now doesn’t live up the expectations I, as a typical consumer of the Web, have for interacting with content. It’s hobbled by the inability to select the exact content I want, to display it as I see fit, and to minimize waste. A lack of printing options also limits my ability to fully enjoy the creative investments I’ve made using the many tools available on the Web and my own original digital content.

I think of the printed page as a device, like my smart phone, but one with a unique combination of features. It’s portable, cheap, replicable, shareable, replaceable, and doesn’t require a power source or any type of connection. I want to be able to print a personalized travel guide that only features content and maps for the places I’m planning to visit (a step forward from the pages I ripped out of my Let’s Go Europe books when backpacking in college). I want to print product specs and pricing information so I can be a more informed shopper. I want to create a cookbook with recipes from my favorite cooking blog so my laptop screen isn’t splattered with tomato sauce.

Print can also be much more than just another convenient format for consuming content—it can be an integral part of the creation itself. I love the immediacy of emailing my digital pictures, but I also love that the Web makes it technically possible and cost efficient to create my own physical scrapbook pages, posters, books, and other products that haven’t even been thought up yet. The Web plus print opens up a whole world of creative possibility to a much broader group of people than ever before.

At HP, we’re excited about leading the charge into the future of the printable web with the Tabblo Print Toolkit and we hope you are too. Take a look at what the press has to say:

San Jose Mercury News
HP to unveil improved Web printing capability
By Therese Poletti

PC Magazine
Do Blogs Need a ‘Print’ Button? At HP, They Do
Mark Hachman
May 30, 2007

Bloomberg
Hewlett-Packard Will Offer Printing Kit for Web-Site Content
May 30, 2007
By Connie Guglielmo

Forbes.com
HP’s Web Plan
By Rachel Rosmarin
May 30, 2007

The New York Times (also appeared on CNet)
Hewlett-Packard Stakes a Claim as an Information Manager
By Claudia H. Deutsch
May 30, 2007

When we first started moving the time spent on our computers to the web, the magic of doing things “over the network” with servers that anyone in the world could access overshadowed a lot of the limitations of the new medium. For instance, the irritating pause that came after pressing the submit button and the unending page reloads were two limitations that we were initially willing to overlook. In fact, it took 10 years (and the interface revolution unleashed by the suite of technologies known as AJAX) for us to approximate the level of interactivity that we had grown used to on the graphical desktop.

With the Tabblo Print Toolkit, we’re hoping to do to printing content from the web what the various AJAX toolkits did for interface interactivity.

Most content that lives online these days was authored for that very purpose, with print being a far distant second-class citizen. And yet there are many maps, product reviews, and blog posts/essays that for various reasons often have a need to exist on paper. But how to format them for this purpose— especially if the original content author hasn’t specified a particular scheme for it?

Enter the Tabblo Print Toolkit.

In its initial form, we’re going to be releasing a beta which consists of two parts: a Javascript widget that will help to harvest relevant content from your webpages, and a corresponding web service that will take the harvested content and turn it into print-ready PDFs for your readers.

But wait, there is more: often times, online content has different physical forms that it can take, depending on the content consumer’s goals. A travel log may for instance have a 1-page itinerary form, a map-heavy version, or a long-essay form for reliving the entire trip. In theory, even the same person may have each of these different needs as he plans, goes on, and reminisces about his trip. With the Tabblo Print Toolkit, the same online content will easily convert into each of these physical forms.

Think of it as the reinvention of the “Print Friendly” button. Except that instead of just a minimally formatted version of the webpage, we’ll be giving your site visitors something that is relevant, appealing, and custom to their needs.

Come back on June 29th for the beta release!

We’re in an article on HP’s new Web2Print (a.k.a., Web 2.0) strategy that ran in today’s New York Times and highlights the fact that we’re up to some interesting stuff to make printing a first-class citizen in this new web ecosystem.

You’ll be seeing more news about it here as it develops but for now a very quick preview: you know that really rich editing experience you get when you’re working on your tabblos? Well get ready for that to take flight and spread to all of those places on the web where you’ve been frustrated up until now— especially when you hit “print.”

Stay tuned…

We have some really exciting news for you: this morning, HP announced its intent to acquire us. The plan is to take the entire Tabblo experience— the editor, the template engine, and the output formats— and spread it far and wide across the web, and frankly, we could not be more excited.

When we launched Tabblo, the simple mission was to take bits to atoms, making the online content that results from popular activities (photo-sharing, blogging, socializing, etc.) compelling enough for users to want to print. We started with sharing photos, words, and templates because we believed the emotion and creativity involved in the act of telling stories was a great first beachhead in becoming the print engine for the web. And nine months, 150 thousand tabblos, and 5 million photos later, you guys have proven us right.

But now it is time to go out and apply our tools to even more type of content. To build new offline formats. Tabblo.com is a great place to tell the kinds of stories that you all have authored on the site, but the rest of the web deserves the same type of smooth transition form online to offline, from bits to atoms.

In the coming months, we’ll be talking more about the new types products and partnerships we are going to build together, but for now, here are the answers to the big 3 questions we know you must be asking:

1. Will Tabblo.com go away?

No, we have no plans to shut down the site - in fact, we’re going to be trying out new and different applications of our technology and we’d love your feedback on it.

2. HP already owns a photo-sharing site (Snapfish). Will Tabblo or Tabblo.com get mushed into Snapfish?

No. Our mission is completely different: we are aiming to make tools that will let us become the print engine for the rest of the web. This means a wide assortment of content that goes beyond traditional online photo sharing.

3. Do you guys still care about the Tabblo community?

Absolutely. We wouldn’t be here without you guys. You pushed and prodded and helped to make the experience what it is today. In fact— we kind of consider you our secret weapon as we move forward in developing new ways to move your content to offline formats. By all means, please keep on tabbloing and stick around to see where the fire in our bellies takes us next…

Creativity is boundless and ideally, so should the forms for expressing it. For the last nine months, we here at Tabblo have constrained ourselves to products that we could build in a factory and ship directly to you. We’ve done this both because there is an impressive set of items to offer through that channel (books, posters, auto-addressed cards, etc.), and because that is the main way in which we make money.

That said, we’ve always thought of the home printer as a very intriguing and appealing option— a sort of mini-Tabblo factory in your home. The process of printing your creations brings with it the reward of immediacy, which after all, is a key ingredient to the success of the web.

We thought about doing posters from home but decided that most home printers were too small and would reduce the overall product impact. Ditto for all of the other products we already had that we could have launched home versions of— they simply had better big siblings from inside the Tabblo factory.

And then it hit us— what if the first product we launched for home printing was something that we couldn’t easily make or ship from within our factory? What if we took advantage of all of the great things about printing from home (immediacy, cheap [free] labor, and no shipping costs or hassles) but kept the rest of the product design and creation experience at the same level as the rest of the products on the site?

Without further ado, say hello to the Tabblo PhotoCube:

Anyone who grew up in the 1970s will remember the rage that were the lucite photo cubes that you could stuff pictures into— I must have had 20 of them on the headboard of my bed. Consider the PhotoCube, a modern-day upgrade: more eco-friendly, more immediate, and ultimately more disposable. Or consider it an evolution on the photo frame.

Now for the facts: anyone can make one of these as long as you have any kind of printer (laser, inkjet, dot-matrix), any type of paper (photo, plain, card), and a pair of scissors, no tape or glue needed. It’s really easy.

So go ahead, make one or a dozen. And when you’re done, make a tabblo and send it our way— as always, we’re looking forward to seeing what you’ll do with the newest member of the Tabblo product family.

We’ve built some powerful tools here at Tabblo that enable people to combine their words and their photos to tell a story. So far our tools have been available through only one channel (www.tabblo.com), and we’ve been exploring other options. We’ve been getting good response from our contacts at private schools. So we decided to take the next step and go where Tabblo has never gone before: a trade show!

Last week, Carey, John, and I went to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Annual Conference in Denver. This conference is attended by more than 2000 heads of school, deans, business officers, and teachers, and a few hundred vendors with something to sell. Over the two days we were able to talk to hundreds of people about Tabblo.

As people walked by our booth, we’d ask them a question: “Do you share your photos on your school’s website?” Most schools answered “yes,” and were interested in improving the experience. They were looking for help with keeping in touch with parents and alumni, with displaying photos, with archiving photos, with keeping their website “fresh,” and with managing privacy concerns.

When we showed the powerful Tabblo editing tools to our booth visitors, they were able to see how a tabblo layout was better than a slideshow or a gallery. They understood that a tabblo can be securely shared with an audience ranging from a single family, to all parents, to alumni, and to the public. We showed them how Tabblo can be delivered using the Private Label Partnership. (Take a peek at how Tabblo looks when integrated with the Carroll School’s website, for instance).

Then we showed them the print products, and their eyes lit up. It’s one thing to see a tabblo on a screen, and it’s another to see it as a poster. Then we’d whip out the BigBook and MiniBook, and they’d really start thinking about how they can change the way they share their school’s photos. They already knew that photos helped them keep in touch with parents and alumni, but hadn’t necessarily considered graduation gifts, faculty recognition, event keepsakes, or fund raiser tools.

We like the response we got at the conference. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have photos and a potential audience, but would like to improve the experience?
• Would you like it to look like it is part of your website (Private Label Partnership, co-branding)?
• Do you like the easy transfer to prints, posters, and books?

If the answer is yes. . . ask us about the Private Label Partnership.

See my tabblo

One of the constant trade-offs we find ourselves making here at Tabblo is between power and simplicity. Power is usually related to finer layout/style/content control and is something we achieve by giving you more knobs to turn. Simplicity is often (though not always) the exact opposite— removing choices so that the whole experience of making stuff online feels more approachable.

Another way to think about simplicity that does not put it at odds with power is to replace the word simple with the word light as in lightweight or lightness. When an authoring experience feels lightweight it is more pleasant, enjoyable, and likely to be repeated more often with better results. And best of all instead of thinking of the whole experience as “make it simpler by taking out options,” you can think of lightness as “make it lighter by pushing the advanced options deeper into the guts and exposing just enough to make most people happy.” Interactive designers call this “progressive disclosure” and as a design pattern it is something that has been a little overdue here at Tabblo.

Today, we’re launching a new make process (see image) that collapses a few steps into the main editor window. This not only makes the overall experience lighter but it also lets you see your layout and style changes in-situ. And lastly, should you start with an online webpage and choose to turn that into a poster or book, you can without having to start over.

So get playing with the new lightness, and as always, send us all of your thoughts by commenting over at Tabblo Issues.

Ok, I promise that this is the last post related to browsing content, ratings, etc. for a while. But this feature is cool enough to blog about.

Ned spent Saturday working on a way to navigate the site by people’s favorites list, and we’ve just pushed it live. In a nutshell what this does is let folks see who has marked a tabblo as a favorite and what else they’ve marked. It is very “web 2.0″ in that the new navigational overlay takes advantage of a gesture that you are making for yourselves (bookmarking something as a favorite) and uses it to provide a virtual tour for your fellow tabbloers.

We had discussed this feature months ago as a possible replacement for ratings but it was not until last night when I saw it on a staging copy of the site that I realized how much more powerful it can be. Give it a go by starting at any of my favorite tabblos.

One final note: since we make people’s favorites lists public (though the tabblos on those lists are not necessarily visible to everyone), this new way of navigating the site does not reveal any information that wasn’t there before. What Ned has done is expose it in a much more digestible format.

Have fun.

One of the most challenging (and rewarding) things about building a software product in the midst of a community of passionate users is knowing when a feature is being rejected by the community because it’s something new and different and when it’s really something that doesn’t jive. And to boot, online apps tend to have a symbiotic relationship with their users where features evolve based on the community and the community in turn is shaped in large part by the features that the site grows which just adds complexity to figuring these types of things out.

Most of the time we feel like we’re doing a good job of that around here but our recent introduction of ratings shows that we too can miss it. Universally controversial both inside and outside of Tabblo, ratings ended up being something that we decided to launch for two reasons: 1. to help navigate the growing wealth of content on the site, and 2. to give one more axis for feedback, mostly for people who were looking for something that was somewhere between the favorites list and the comments.

The debate on why ratings were not good for Tabblo started in the forum, continued in support emails, and culminated yesterday in a tabblo by one of our users who felt strongly enough to consider quitting Tabblo altogether. We had been working on a replacement for ratings that felt more “Tabblo” and this morning we pushed it up to the site.

Introducing, the Tabblo wink.

Where the old dreaded Netflix/Amazon/YouTube 5-star widget used to be, we now have a small Tabblo icon. If you mouse over it, you will see a “Wink if you like this tabblo.” Winks are then used as an input to determine what shows up on the “popular” page (and to avoid people who may want to game the system, we’re not quite ready to say exactly how we weigh them) but nowhere else on the site. That is, you’ll never see a “this tabblo has X winks” message, and we may just never divulge just how much a wink counts for.

I hope that this is acceptable to everyone who chimed in over the last couple of weeks on all sides of this debate (both inside and outside of Tabblo). For sure I can not promise that we won’t have other equally controversial features coming down the road, but I can least promise you that when we do, we will address the issues that come up in the same way we did with ratings— openly and collaboratively with you all.