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>

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?

There is a biting piece in this morning’s New York Times about the Shutterfly saga and how its IPO has not proven to be the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow that most of its founders/investors expected. It’s really too bad— after all Shutterfly is the last of the photo 1.0 sites that is still independent, and they seem to have users that like what their product (Shutterfly is after all, the most mentioned site by the photo 1.0 refugees that we’ve gotten at Tabblo).

At the end of the day, the challenge that all of these guys (Shutterfly, Ofoto, and Snapfish) faced was building and ramping big businesses on two flawed assumptions. The first was that people would print a lot more 4×6s than they actually want to print in the era of digital cameras. When combined with the fact that there was a commonditization of the silver-halide print market (taking prices from $0.50 to $0.12 in a couple of years), this was cause for just horrible economics for all three of these guys. However, alone this flawed assumption is correctable which is why you see all three vendors moving aggressively into specialty print products (books, cards, calendars) and away from the dying 4×6.

What really got these guys was the second flawed assumption which was that getting users online who want to share pictures would cut their cost of customer acquisition well below what it has needed to be, mainly because of how “viral” or at least “social” sharing pictures by this means would be. As it turns out, sharing pictures through a website is not as much of a compelling activity as say building commentable online profile pages (MySpace) or group tagging of photos (Flickr). The reason: most of what you can get from a Shutterfly/Ofoto/Snapfish experience you can get from simply attaching a bunch of pictures to an email and sending them to your friends.

In other words, Shutterfly and the gang were not competing against each other on sharing (as they were on the dwindling print market side) but against non-consumption— or more accurately, simply sending the pictures by email. And, as all of the groupware or social people will tell you, email is a powerful foe to vanquish. As the Internet’s first killer app, it’s easy, flexible, and provides natural data replication.

This is also why we at Tabblo have been super focused on the editor, the collaborative authoring experience, and the transition from bits to atoms— three things that are not easy to ape with email. Just like Flickr nailed it on the collaborative tagging and grew a huge community out of that, we’re hoping that by providing enough additional value over email for sharing photos, we can avoid the trap of competing against non-consumption.

UPDATE: If you want to see some of the other ways in which we’re hoping to compete against email, send an email with some photos to share@tabblo.com with some email addresses that you want to share the photos with in the body of the email. It’s in beta testing now— but hopefully marries some of the niceties of email with what makes Tabblo special.

Just a quick note to let people know that we’ve added the ability to print your tabblos as a series of posters with different chunks of the tabblo on different posters. Why? Because folks asked for multiple pages with which to tell their stories, and since paper just doesn’t stretch as well as a webpage, we decided to oblige.

One of the neatest things about this is that the multi-page editor is built out of the same ingredients as the tabblo editor so learning to work online is all you’ll need to be laying out an entire wall-full of posters.

Keep an eye out for more products coming very soon now that we’ve got pagination properly baked into the site. And, as always, feel free to send any and all feedback by email to “feedback at tabblo dot com” or by posting to the forums.

When people ask what is distinct about Tabblo, one of the answers we often give is around our layout engine. It’s meant to be part personal art director, part free-form tool, and part easy publishing for photos, text, and styling elements, all through a standards-compliant web-browser interface. We spend a lot of time thinking hard about how to make it smoother, easier, and more powerful at the same time, so it’s really cool to see folks at Microsoft Research taking this concept to a whole new level with their recently announced Photosynth project.

Essentially a 3-D layout engine with a lot less art director and a lot more spacial mapper, Photosynth could be a very cool way of both presenting photos and organizing them as well.

Go check out the video– it’s very cool in that Minority Report-esque way.

Via: nonsmoking area

Laurie Sullivan has an interesting take on Tabblo which argues that we are re-focusing on the “professional” market. This seems to suggest that we have somehow “given up” on regular folks but the reality is that we at Tabblo don’t believe in this amateur/professional split to begin with, and if there was anything the public beta did for us, it was only to cement the core belief that when you provide the right tools to “regular folks” you can get some pretty stunning results which can far outstrip the work of “the pros.”

On the Internet, we’re all creators, and we’re all amateurs. To talk about aiming something at “professionals” seems… well, sort of dated.

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!