Web 2.0 as a concept many flaws in it, but one of these is not the “the dictatorship of the presentation layer” as described by Bill Thompson in his post on Web 2.0 and Tim O’Reilly as Marshall Tito. A nice turn of phrase perhaps— but as we say in Spanish: “mas flojo que un mojon mojado” as far as the argument goes.

The whole fallacy starts when Thompson characterizes AJAX (one of the cornerstones of Web 2.0) as the:

answer for developers who want to offer users a richer client experience without having to go the trouble of writing a real application.

Not true. Having just spent the last year and a half building a content creation tool that is 100% browser-based and “AJAX powered,” and having just this weekend* matched the level of functionality that I spent the 2.5 years before that building into “real applications,” I can attest to the fact that the AJAX version is easily an order of magnitude harder to write than a native Win32/Mac OS application. You’ve got to deal with runtimes that are all a little bit different, you’ve got to deal with server roundtrips, network latency, and a protocol that is (despite the best intent of XmlHttpRequest) straw-thin and dumb simple. You’ve got scalability, concurrency, memory footprint, and a badly baked-in set of user affordances (hello, Back button?). And when you’re done with all of that, you’ve got a ADD-inspired user that will spend about 5 seconds trying to figure out what you app is about before riding a hyperlink out never to return again. If mitigating risk in the face of complexity were the main goal, I would take scaling algorithms and Thompson’s “message passing between distributed objects” any day over the primordial soup that all of us working to build rich Internet applications in open and extensible ways swim in every day. Hands down.

Put simply, AJAX is not about easier GUIs and cool effects. What makes the suite of associated bits known as AJAX (and specifically DOM manipulation and asynchronous server calls) so important is that it is mashable, transparent, and most importantly, late-binding in the way that it can be recombined post-facto to build value the original application designer never intended. Witness the huge explosion in innovation that Google Maps brought to the world after it was launched.

If it was just about easier GUIs, we’d all be using Flash— much more controlled runtimes and much easier debugging. But Flash is terrible for what makes Web 2.0 special because it lacks the two great enabling attributes of AJAX: “View source” (and all of the associated shallow ramp that comes with it) and IPC (Inter Process Communication) facilitated via the webpage. I’m sure the Adobe guys are not stupid and are working hard to fix this— but with AJAX as it now stands, we’ve already got it, and it makes the absolute pain in the ass that it is to build rich interactive applications out of what was fundamentally conceived of as a display render worth it.

Thompson’s piece is fairly light-weight and so I found myself wondering why it irked me so. And then I realized why— because I’ve spent too much time in lecture halls and at conferences listening to the architecture astronauts talk about the “real computer science—” time I would gladly trade for more time with guys like the hackers at Tabblo who work very hard to make less than ideal technologies like AJAX sing.

* And, while I am on that— if you don’t believe me, come back in six hours to see it for yourself.

[NOTE: This post is actually a cross-post from my regular blog but given what we're launching tomorrow, I thought it was worth using it as a preface for what is coming]

We here at Tabblo feel like there should be a special place at the table set out for the web browser given what a big part of our lives it happens to exist in. But hopefully the rest of you guys are able to tear yourselves away from it and spend some QT with your families and other meatspace attractions.

When we get back to the keyboards this weekend, we promise to have some interesting things for you all to play with. In the meantime, please enjoy your turkey and your families. And for those of you outside the US, do us the favor of taking a moment to enjoy your families and friends as well.

See you all in the ether…

We’ve made some big changes today and it helps to describe those changes in the following way: we’ve enabled greater creativity by giving you a new set of frames to work with.

Frames are important.  My favorite Frank Zappa quote is:

The most important thing in art is The Frame. For painting: literally; for other arts: figuratively— because, without this human appliance, you can’t know where The Art stops and The Real World begins. You have to put a ‘box’ around it because otherwise, what is that shit on the wall?”

What you create is defined not only by what you put in the frame, but what you leave out.  The frame is about the choices you make for how the work is created as well as how it is bound.

But too often we get wrapped up in thinking about what’s inside the box and forget about the frame we’ve chosen.  Over the last few months at Tabblo, we’ve certainly focused on better text handling and image control but without stretching our ideas on how we bound our tabblos.  For example, what if the tabblo didn’t scroll?  What if the length were fixed? What if a tabblo had many pages?  More broadly speaking, should the social Web be primarily a vertical medium?  Can the Web provide the same kind of rich, punctuated dramatic motion as film? And most importantly:  what new frames can we put on a social web experience to tell richer, more interesting stories?

Well, we think our community of artists, artisans, artistes, art mamas, art punks, and art snobs has the answer.  And that’s what we want to find out.

So here is what we are offering— other formats that take you beyond online tabblos to tell your stories.  Right now we have very traditional offline formats: posters, postcards, and (soon) books.  But we plan to go beyond that over the next few months and enable you to create your own online and offline formats.  Define your frame and share that with the community.  Design a scrapbook page customized to your liking.  Make a tabblo that allows the viewer to pause.  Create a format that scrolls from side to side.  Punctuate your story with pages.  Explore the options.  Stretch what it means to create a tabblo and hopefully you will find new ways of telling stories.

And as always tell us what you think.  It is always helpful to hear another frame of reference.

Among the top 5 requests we’ve gotten over the last six months has been that we add support for video to Tabblo. It would seem that everyone has YouTube fever but we think they’re all wrong and here’s why…

See my Tabblo>

1. Video (like audio) is a linear form of media which means that you’ve got to sit there and consume most of it in order to get the gist of what’s going on. One of the reasons why we chose to do the “tabblo” as our first format out of the gate (a tabblo is a long scrolling webpage that has a) a template, b) some photos, c) some text, and d) a permalink) was because we felt that it was much more native to the web surfing experience than most of the other post-gallery experiments with photos. Zippy-zoom Flash slideshows are nice but the reality is that they break the web-browsing experience with something that seems as foreign to it as bowling does to a movie theatre. This is not to say that embedded video clips on a webpage are that foreign but what is true is that one of the things we are trying to do is make photos (as in the collection of them) relevant again (Flickr made “the photo” relevant on its own) and part of our theory was that people have gotten tired of the endless invitations to Shutter-Snap-Foto with a link to a gallery of 40 pictures of the baby snorting. And after the first 5 video clips of the baby doing the same thing, we may be in the same wide world of hurt.

2. There is just so much left to be done with a more expressive tool for compositing photos that it seems a shame to jump to some new format too quickly. You can do this or this or this— all of which can be enjoyed by friends and family without a significant time investment. Try doing that same level of story-telling with a browser-based video editor to see what that experience can be like.

3. There is something to be said for doing one thing well before moving on to other stuff. For us it’s clear that this one thing has to do with the editing/compositing experience of photos and words, and until we feel like we’ve cleaned that clock, it’s hard to divert attention to trying to bring the same level of creative expression to online video editing. To that end, stay tuned over the next few days as we roll out “Tabblo 2.0…”

Before everyone declares Yahoo dead and irrelevant, we at Tabblo figured we’d throw a little support behind the company that has given us a whole bunch of help in getting this whole thing going.

I’m referring of course to the recent pile-on regarding the “leaked” memo declaring Yahoo lost, fat, and too thinly spread to be relevant penned by SVP Brad Garlinghouse. As one of the web’s venerable veterans, Yahoo is indeed facing a formidable set of challenges, but we should all take a moment to be clear on the fact that it would be a much worse world for all of us little startups if the big purple giant was to disappear. Here are some pretty concrete reasons why:

* when we got started back in May, we decided as a last minute thing to support Flickr integration. Actually, I sort of thought that we were going to end up not doing it because we really didn’t leave any time in the schedule for the work. But it was so easy every step of the way from getting the commercial API key to getting through their API that it just became a no-brainer. And still to this day we talk about how the early folks at Tabblo that Flickr sent us were absolutely key in getting us off the ground.

* when Yahoo released its Yahoo UI library, we (like many others who were frustrated with buggy versions of scriptaculous) jumped right on it. Incredibly well-documented and well-thought out, the YUI was a great help to our effort at building a re-usable and powerful UI that was truly cross-browser (and though we’ve since switched out a bunch of it for a home-grown, we still use it today).

Overall, Yahoo as a company is a good member of this ecosystem— and strategy woes notwithstanding— we should all try to remember that.

See my Tabblo>

We haven’t bothered to do much promotion of the new Tabblo Groups feature that we launched last week mostly because we wanted to test it slowly and see if this first implementation was fit enough to broadly announce to the community.

However, despite the fact that it has only been one week, Tabblo Groups has been the feature most rapidly adopted by our community since the launch of the original editor. Without being expressly told about it, Tabblo members have created groups about countries, architecture, Christmas, street photography, color, and more.

Most of the groups have fewer than 25 members but because we combine the ability to collect and feature tabblos with an integrated discussion forum, they are active and composed of very engaged storytellers looking to share their own work and socialize with like minds.

It’s been a good lesson for us— we put groups off for quite a while because we felt that the basic form of a group/forum was fairly trivial to implement and therefore not unique enough to be worth spending “Tabblo cycles” on. Instead we focused on the harder stuff around the flexibility and power of the tool. But sometimes people just want to be social, and this is especially true when the substrate for socializing is really high quality content.

So what are you waiting for? Go join a group today. Or better yet, create your own!

CNN is reporting that Netcraft is claiming we’re now at 100 million websites online. Wowee! This is an amazing thing given how much of a pain it is to get a website up and running. True enough, the era of the lightweight personal CMS has drastically lowered the barrier to creating websites (3 clicks in some cases), but we’ve got a long way to go still. After all, how many people do you know that both put up a website and then keep updating it?

Think of blogs for a moment: they solve the constant update problem by giving you a very rigid template to pour your content into: the reverse chronological diary. New services like Vox may spice this up with glitzy styles but underneath the paint job, it’s still the same car. Which runs on the same gas— namely, the brief text entry with a title and a date.

To get to the next 100 million sites our bet at Tabblo is that the publishing was not only going to have to get easier but also support different kinds of content forms. The “tabblo” is our best guess at what one such form may look like— part photo gallery and part blog entry it tries to achieve three things: use the type of content most regular folks have and want to share (digital photos), do it with enough creative freedom to make the authoring experience rewarding (the Tabblo editor), and do it in a “web native” way (i.e., scrollable pages, permalinks, and RSS).

So that is a little bit on our reasons for making up this wacky new format and giving it a name. It has many offline cousins: the scrapbook and the collage are just two that we hear about a lot when our members describe Tabblo.

With respect helping to get to the next 100 million sites— how are we doing?