Despite the fact that the terminology is from a long-forgotten era of packaged software, today Tabblo goes 1.0, meaning that we are officially taking the “beta” label off of the site’s logo and using a Sharpie to sign all of our names on the cages at the data center.

For us being out of beta is an important milestone, not because it implies that we are bug-free (we certainly are not), but because it means that we’ve reached a set of features and capabilities which we feel define the core Tabblo experience.

Just to recap:

Tabblo aims to be the best place online to put together photos, words, and template-driven customizable design for the purpose of telling stories that can be securely shared, collaborated on, and printed in innovative ways.

Over the past six weeks we’ve had the added benefit of an active community that has helped prioritize features, suggested improvements to core parts of the application, and even taken an active role in defining the future of our printed product offerings. We’d like to take a moment here to thank all of you and let you know how much we appreciate the help we’ve gotten thus far.

Now, on to some of the 1.0 highlights:

1. Prints & Frames: Though we did not originally set out thinking we would provide prints, you have asked for it repeatedly, and we’re listening. Since silver-halide printing is not an expertise of ours, we looked around for the best possible partner and settled on EZPrints as our preferred online partner (you can read more about EZPrints compared to other services here).

Additionally, we’re also launching framed posters at the 11×17 size which was also a popular and loud early request. You have three available options on the frame, and as we get up to speed, we will be adding more.

2. Better, Faster & Easier:

We’ve done a lot to improve the overall experience: from the new photo organizer to the rectangle template layouts to the new editor for swapping and resizing images– all the speed and stability improvements were all aimed at ensuring that tabblo composition was faster, easier, and more fun.

One special area of improvement worth mentioning is the uploaders; as Linus Torvalds once said, given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow. Having had users trying just about every kind of OS/browser/uploader combination has really helped to harden the uploaders and the upload process for all five of our current upload/integration options.

3. More ways to participate:

Our invitation machinery (and its associated privacy system) is rich and powerful, and a lot of you have been happy with the way that it keeps your photos and tabblos secure and visible only to your guests. But sometimes on the web, what you need is a private link that can be forwarded, pasted into documents, and shared in other ways without the overhead of a full authentication system. Our new “shareable links” are the answer to this; you can now IM them, email them (and have the email forwarded) while still feeling good about the privacy of your tabblos.

What’s next?

We’re very excited about what July is going to bring to Tabblo in terms of new collaborative features, so stay tuned to the blog and forums for announcements and news as to where development is going.

Happy tabbloing!

A review of Tabblo’s public beta is in Walt Mossberg’s column today, running in print and online here in the US, and in Europe and Asia. We could not be more proud. It is always nice to be in a column that is usually written on products from companies like Apple, Google, and Sony, but the really nice thing for us is how much care Walt and Katie took in using the site, testing the features, and generally groking what it is that we set out to build with Tabblo.

We spend a lot of our time talking to lead users out in the blogosphere, and one of the most common first reactions we get is: “why focus on photos? They are so done!” right before getting an earful about video podcasts, MMPORPGs, and other future-tense stuff that we, being geeks, love to talk about. This can sometimes reach a fevered pitch that sends us into mini-identity crises about whether we should be supporting X cool format or doing Y cool interaction model.

Getting a review like this that so cleanly lays out what we are trying to do from an independent, respected, and experienced voice in technology helps to keep us focused on what we set out to do: take an activity which has been thus far very limited- telling stories with photos, words, and design online and in print around interested communities- and build the next generation of tools and spaces for it.

On a more personal note, the most rewarding aspect of being a small company with a review like this is that you really feel how every person counts. As I read the review today, I was happy to see that every single person here contributed in some significant way to all of the features that were hi-lighted as cool or unique about Tabblo.

Now back to the regularly scheduled program: welcoming all of the Personal Technology readers as we finish all of the features for our 1.0 release.

Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Eddie and I work on the Tabblo team. Nice to meet you.

I have focused a lot of my efforts here into making sure we had a jump start on good uploaders. Uploading is one of those necessary evils for a photo site. We want Tabblo users to spend the bulk of their time creating beautiful stories about their lives, not waiting for files to upload. And though we have not yet seen the realization of our grandest dreams in this regard, we are making steady progress. We have forms-based, Flash, Java and ActiveX uploaders, as well as a steadily improving Flickr integration that allows Flickr users to quickly leverage all the pain they already spent uploading to Flickr without having to go through it again at Tabblo. We have an iPhoto plugin that allows users of the default photo album manager on the Mac to upload their photos and make a story in just a few clicks. I’ve written but not yet released an experimental Windows shell extension uploader as well — this one I’m on the fence about, since it’s written in .NET. All that aside, though, what I really came here to write about was Tabblo’s unique Picasa extension.

I came across Picasa and Hello in 2004 or early 2005. At the time, I had been thinking a lot about the fact that I was frustrated by the lack of photo integration options in Blogger — one of my personal websites involves a lot of reviewing and picture-taking, and so having a place to land a lot of text and a lot of photos is really important to me. Blogger by itself didn’t really give me what I wanted. Enter Picasa and Hello. Besides being a good photo album tool in its own right, Picasa floored me with its integration into Blogger, not because I was unaware that Google had bought up Blogger too, but because I couldn’t believe how dead-on they were in seeing this problem domain and trying to offer a solution. To my mind, the idea of integrating photo sharing into a messenger-style app and then integrating that into an album manager and a blogging tool was a fresh and plausible leap in the right direction.

Fast forward a few months and I’m joining Tabblo to take another stab at that problem from a different direction. As I reach the upload problem, you can imagine how I envision the solution from a distance:

• web uploaders: Forms, Java, Flash, ActiveX
• importers: Flickr
• client apps, Mac: iPhoto
• client apps, Windows: …Picasa!

But, as I start doing research into Picasa, I find that there’s nothing out there in the way of plugins. The closest thing I find is the ability for people to create their own custom album formats by introducing new exporter XML descriptions (from what I understand). Though this could come in handy later, it’s not going to solve the problem I want to solve of getting photos from Picasa right into Tabblo with no intermediate steps. Drat.

Over Christmas, however, I had another chance to take a closer look at Picasa, and I found a way to get exactly what I needed. Some hacking and hard work later, and the Tabblo Picasa extension was born. If you’ve not yet seen it in the wild, the extension puts a new button labelled ‘Send to Tabblo’ right next to BlogThis! in Picasa’s album manager interface. All you need to do to get your photos onto Tabblo is select some photos from your Picasa albums, click the ‘Send to Tabblo’ button, enter your Tabblo login, and voila, your Picasa managed photos end up on Tabblo available for storytelling! As far as I know, this extension is a one-of-a-kind for Picasa, and we’re more than psyched to bring it to our users.

When I left the Mac for a PC, I really missed iPhoto. But now Windows (and Linux!) users can grab Picasa and the Tabblo Picasa extension and get a really powerful combination of photo management and sharing tools. We hope you’ll try out our extension and let us know what you think. Write some comments here, or post on our forums!
~e

p.s. Picasa just released a new version that has a web albums tool built in. This upgrade is currently in beta and available only to invitees that sign up at picasa.com. I got my hands on a copy today, and I found out that with a slight modification to the Tabblo Picasa extension, it will work with this new version of Picasa. So if you’re one of the Picasa beta users, we’ll be releasing our updated installer early next week at the latest. All you’ll have to do is run the new Tabblo Picasa extension installer after your Picasa upgrade, and then restart Picasa. So stay tuned!