Given that we’re only two weeks into a wild ride consisting of having introduced books (a killer product) during December (the busiest time of the year for us), posting on the blog has been light as of late. However, today we launched a feature that we’ve been talking about here at Tabblo for a while, and it would be remiss of us not to at least mention it.

For the first time since we introduced printed products, you can now share, comment, and collaborate on any of our physical products online. Just as though they were online tabblos.

We first talked about doing this when we redesigned the user flow around PFPs (product focused paths) to allow people who just wanted a poster/postcard/book to come to the site and do that without being shoe-horned through the tabblo-making experience first, but for various different reasons this last bit of functionality fell off the overly ambitious development schedule.

Let’s make it more concrete. Say I want to share a book I made on Tabblo. Naturally, I could order 12 copies for all of my friends and family and mail it to them. But I could also just invite them to this:

(or as in this this case, just export the book to my blog)

And by doing so, folks can come to see it, comment on it, create variations from it, and if they want, even buy their own copy. Ditto for any of our existing products, and for all of the products we plan to introduce over the next year.

We think this is incredibly cool and useful because it means that we’re giving physical objects permanent URLs to exist on the Internet, and exposing these URLs both inside and outside of the Tabblo community (since we flow each of these new objects through the now battle-worn Tabblo access-control system, you can make them as private or public as you want). The sky is the limit as far as what we can now do from a product development perspective because of this, and more importantly, as far as what you guys are going to do with it as we head into 2007.

And finally, just because it’s mega-geek cool to mention it, try paging through the book above. Almost like the real thing, no?

The Tabblo community is busy making books, posters & holiday postcards, so we figured it was time to do something special for the holidays … Introducing new holiday themes!

Designed to help you share holiday cheer, these themes make a great way to send “e-cards” to update friends and family. So send seasons greetings — with the fun and power of the Tabblo editing experience.

Enjoy! And as always, let us know what you think.

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>

So we at Tabblo looked at this whole idea of Flickr’s interestingness concept as something we should also do. After all, as a crew of mostly engineers, we were sure that we could reduce everything that went into making a good tabblo into one formula. Clearly, we were wrong.

Interestingness is a nice idea, and it’s good to see Flickr trying to get a patent for it but at the end of the day, it seems to me that what you want is to give the people who are interested in the content, the right vectors for navigating it without surprises and without the “AI” factor.

Let me explain: at Tabblo, we’ve got this notion of “featured tabblos” that is very similar in spirit and form to Flickr’s interestingness. We take attention metadata: number of visits, number of repeat visits, number of comments, length of time between visitors, number of times marked as favorite, etc. and we plow it all into a formula that has squares, third-roots, and exponents in it to come up with the list of what our community sees as being worthy of the featured label. The result: almost invariably we’ve got a whole bunch of frustrated content creators who don’t understand why their stuff is not featured, and more importantly, we’ve got a bunch of frustrated content viewers who are not seeing what they want in the featured list.

So it’s time to stop being such dorks and just disaggregate all of this attention metadata. Real soon now we’re going to introduce the ability to surf tabblos by raw views, raw number of times they’ve been marked as as a favorite, and number of times they have been commented on. The “a-ha!” moment came when we realized that as admins these were exactly the vectors of activity we were using— in a disaggregated manner— to see what tabblos we should be placing at the front of our featured queue.

Sometimes it’s clear that our own dorkiness becomes our own worst enemy. For no matter how hard we want to believe it, it is clear that the world of tastes will never be reducible to just one equation. Especially not when we’re dealing with people’s ability to tell stories in visual mediums. Stay tuned…

I was giving a demo to an editor at New York magazine yesterday when something interesting happened that reminded me of what a crappy experience content creators on the web have had for the last 10 years when it comes to the power of the browser-based tools we use for our daily work.

As I was showing him the way an implicit design grid and layout manager interact to constantly keep your work in balance, the art director at the magazine walked by the conference room we were in, and because my host was particularly effusive, was dragged in and made to sit through the demo. “Look,” the reviewer kept saying to him, “you can drag this corner and it all reflows! You can flip this text with the photo like this and you can even get this in print!” The guy looked decidedly nonplused and at the end of it what seemed like an eternity to me simply stated: “So? This is the way all of my desktop tools work” followed by the real kicker: “this is the way the web should have always worked.”

Flying back to Boston, I realized two things. First, he’s absolutely right: if we really do believe in a future where everyone can be a content creator, the web needs to start working a lot more like our critic expects it to. The editing experience of any kind of online content not only needs to be easy and intuitive and automated where possible, but also much more powerful. And in what is perhaps a controversial statement that we’ve been making since the beginning of Tabblo— the resulting end product needs to look good. Taste is absolutely subjective, but ask anyone about their impressions of MySpace— anyone— and it won’t take 5 minutes for them to get on to how heinous or tacky most of the profile pages on the site are.

Is that because of all of the people on MySpace suffer from an utter lack of taste? It is very hard to make this argument as the userbase approaches 100 million; more likely, the range of creative expression that the MySpace tools offer is what forces everyone’s page to look like Geocities after the “Great Blink Tag Rage of ‘96.”

My second realization was equally important; we’ve got a set of models for what these tools need to look like in the creative suites most art departments use today. Just like iMovie was borne out of Avid machines and Garageband out of Pro Tools, we’ve still got a lot to learn from Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, and friends. True, these tools are barely accessible to mere mortals, and the constraints of the web really do make one rethink fundamental interaction patterns (hello Gmail!), but the deeper we get into building the One True Multimedia Editor to Rule Them All, the more we find ourselves re-implementing primitives from desktop publishing tools (i.e., unlimited undo, layers, property panes)— albeit in more accessible forms.

We always estimated that it was going to take 18 months to get the editor to where we wanted it to be— not only because it just takes that long to write and refine software— but because without you guys hammering on it everyday and giving us lots of explicit and implicit feedback, we’d end up a camel and not a horse. So for being 120 days into it, we’re pretty happy. After all, we’ve been amazed by the expressive power that most of you have managed to flex in using Tabblo to make cool stuff. However, we’re probably only 5% of the way to where we want to be in terms of the tool— and it’s good to be reminded of this by tastemakers who do this for a living.

Now back to work…

We’ve started running contests on Tabblo which have been mainly focused around “photos” and recently it occurred to us that this was not the way to go about it. Specifically, over the last few months we’ve been very gratified to see a whole bunch of you become very good “tabbloers” by which we mean people who understand the power of the tabblo as a format.

In order to fix this, we’re now going to start exclusively running tabblo-centric contests. Now this may not be as successful in terms of getting new people in the door (because after all who out there knows what “tabbloing” is?) but it certainly will be more fun for the regulars, and we’re pretty sure by the end of the month we’re going to have some pretty impressive content.

To that end, this month’s contest is around a theme: moving. Which meaning of moving? That is up to you. How many pictures? How many words? Again up to you. This is how it’s going work: by October 11th, we’ll have a “moving gallery” page to aggregate everyone’s work and on Halloween we’ll get a panel of judges to vote 10 winners. The top tabblo gets a week on the front page and winners 2-10 also get some amount of front page rotation. More importantly, the author of the top tabblo gets a Nikon S7c 7-megapixel camera and winners 2-10 will each get a $30 Tabblo certificate that can be applied to any of the products in our store.

So what are you waiting for? Get moving…

[ UPDATE: I guess the whole tagging thing isn't terribly clear on Tabblo as of yet as a few folks have contacted me asking where to post their contest entries. For now, just send me an invite inside of Tabblo so I know about your entry. Tomorrow we'll put something up that will make things easier and more clear with respect to posting stuff ]

Today we’re introducing a site upgrade which features two cool improvements and a whole host of little fixes:

First, we’re introducing “variations” into the mix. A variation is a riff on someone else’s tabblo- a way to re-purpose their creative investment. Here is how it works: first, as an author of a tabblo, you can let other people create variations of your work in the same way that you assign view permissions. This means that when a guest is looking at your tabblo, he can pick up where you’ve left off and add his own photos and words, change your template, or just plain start over- on a copy of your tabblo. What is this good for? Say you’ve both been to the same soccer game and happen to disagree about the critical shot that belongs at the top- with variations, you can each have your own take on it (and they will both be linked together for others to see). Ditto for concerts, vacations, or just about any other group activity. Think of it like a wiki for photos and words with style. And definitely check out sample variations here and here to see how we link them all together.

Second, we’re introducing a general overhaul to our layout engine. We launched Tabblo around the notion that we could provide you with a “personal art director in software” by codifying some of what we knew were basic rules about good design in the way that the layout engine works with your photos, words, and template choices. Over the last 100 days, many tabblos have been made with this art-director-in-software’s help and a common theme we’ve heard about repeatedly has been that some of its decisions when shifting the elements on tabblos around appear “random.” We launched unlimited undo to help reverse the choices you didn’t like, but today we’re also introducing more transparency in the layout decisions being made on your behalf with the new layout engine UI. It’s too hard to describe appropriately in words (see this movie for a demo), so just head over to the site, make a tabblo, and use the new “Shuffle photos” option (in the Advanced toolbar) to see magic happen to your tabblo. If you like cinematic effects, this one is for you. And even if you don’t, you should find some of the general improvements in speed and layout choices pleasing.

Finally, we’ve also got a whole host of improvements that have been driven primarily by user feedback: better (more robust) Flickr & Blogger import/export, general speed improvements across the site, and automatic captioning when using your mobile phone camera and auto-tabblos are just a few of these, so make sure to check them out.