Video killed the photo star
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…
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…”