It’s been a busy two weeks here at Tabblo. This post is going to cover some of the improvements that we have made to the service, but first I should say that it is easily ten times more rewarding, fun, and exciting to be making all of these changes with all of you alongside us. Your feedback thus far has been almost as rewarding and thoughtful as the tabblos you have made on the system, and we are all extremely proud of the emerging Tabblo community.

Now on to the improvements which fall loosely into three areas: 1. navigation/organization, 2. scalability and grace under load and 3. control.

Navigation

People like to look at tabblos, people like to click on links, and most of all people like people- go figure! We have made many improvements to all of the basic viewing pages including My Circle, My Page, the upload pages, and the account/profile pages. Basically everywhere where you told us what to do next wasn’t clear, or commented about not being able to reach something, we tweaked or redid. Stay tuned though for more inter-tabblo navigation coming soon.

Grace under Fire

We’ve had quite some interest in Tabblo. From the early Flickr folks who brought over thousands of photos each to the demanding graphics pros who made the template engine do things we didn’t know could be done, you have been a dedicated bunch. As such, we found ourselves dealing with load during the first few days, and have taken a few steps to make all this AJAX goodness work better under pressure. Most obvious to you is a new message dialog system which will tell you clearly when your browser is blocked waiting for the server to update something. Hopefully you won’t be seeing too much of it, but when you do, at least you will know what is happening. Also, behind the scenes we are now much more aggressive about logging everything that could possibly go wrong so that we can be on top of any hiccups on the site.

Control

Tabblo is meant to be your own personal art director, but more control is something that you’ve asked for in spades, and we’re gearing up to give it to you. As a first step, we’ve introduced all sorts of text sizing in your tabblos so that you can blow up your words as large as you want them. Additionally, you can now change colors on most elements in your tabblos, and pick just about any color your heart desires. Our new color picker is the first step in making sure your tabblos look just like you want them.

Stay tuned, as we’ve got some interesting things coming out over the next couple of weeks (more feedback-related features). And, as always, thank you for tabbloing.

Launch week here at Tabblo has been quite an experience. We spent the last half of last week feverishly polishing the software, testing, going over details with our printers, and generally trying to make sure everything was perfect for launch.

The weekend was more of the same, but conducted over IM from disparate locations as we tried to celebrate Mother’s Day while still working toward Monday’s opening day. Generally, the last minute work was focused on improving the code we’d already written, but being passionate users of Tabblo, we actually implemented four new features over the weekend! I’ll leave it to you to figure out which they are…

Monday was the big day, and we were excited to watch what happened. What happened was a lot of people came to the site, and the servers had some difficulty keeping up at first. We had engineered them to handle that load, of course, but we had never had the opportunity to see them under real use by that many users, so we spent the morning watching, analyzing, tweaking, and improving the infrastructure. We had a few instances of overzealous engineers making “improvements” that actually broke something, but we were able to get things back on track quickly.

By lunch time, the servers seemed happy and humming along, and we could start to focus on what users were actually doing and saying. It’s a wonderful feeling to have something you’ve been working on for so long finally be available to the public and see what they do with it.

The past week has been a wild ride, with a lot of work, a lot of stress, but much more: excitement, satisfaction, and pride.

Today marks the beginning of our public beta here at Tabblo and it feels good. Over the last two months we have gone from alpha to private beta, and from 4 users to 400. We went from rinky servers running under our desks to a full cage of two-way AMD64 servers that could heat a small apartment building. But most importantly, we’ve really come together as a team: learning each other’s hotspots, finishing each other’s sentences, and best of all, developing a shared vision for what Tabblo can be to the average content creator on the web.

None of what we’ve done so far compares to opening up the front door and letting people come in off the street. I think everyone here is extremely proud of what we are putting out in this public beta but at the same time, I think if you asked the average Tabblo team member: “How far are you in implementing the plan of what Tabblo is going to be?” you would get answers that range from 3-7% of the way there.

Part layout tool, part personal art director, part editing app on the web, and part community, Tabblo has a lot of growing up to do. However, one thing that we are all very aware of is that we can’t get there there without your help: your tabblos, your feedback, and most importantly, your passionate use.

So have at it: play around, make tabblos, and tell your friends and family to do the same. Look for those moments of joy that come from the “hey, I did that!” feeling that is like crack to creative folks. But also feel free to get pissed at us, to rail against the limitations of the system, to kick and scream and threaten to leave. We’re listening and are well aware that it is only through this joint process of give-and-take with our users that we can get close to delivering on the Tabblo vision.