We’re launching Tabblo Valentines today so that you can spread some love with the expected Tabblo flair. Using one of three new folded card templates and the Tabblo editor you’ve come to know, get your photos and words into a custom card that is uniquely from you.

But wait, there is more. All you’ve got to do is bring your creativity and we’ll do the rest. We’ll print the card, stamp it, and ship it— all for $1. And the best part is that you don’t need anything more than your Valentine recipient’s email address (or Tabblo username, more on that below). That’s right, after you enter their email, we can take care of getting their real mailing address by sending them an email on your behalf. And while they’ll know you’re sending them a bit of Tabblo love, we won’t reveal your design or your special message for them.

As far as we can tell, Valentine’s Day was really blown out in the US as one of those manufactured holidays that serves as another reason to buy Hallmark cards, flowers, and chocolates, so the big question for us was: why jump into the fray? We’re doing it for 3 reasons.

1. Gifts are better when they are personalized and we at Tabblo are all about that. Down with cards churned out by the millions and canned sentiments!

2. Doing it all for a buck seemed like a really compelling notion for people tired of overpaying at the store. Or worse yet (as in my case), buying a bunch of overpriced cards that never get sent because of missing addresses, stamps, etc.

3. And this one really matters: over the last months, we’ve had a lot of folks who’ve become friends on the site, and one of the most common requests we hear is users who want more ways to show appreciation over these new found relationships. Auto addressing is made for these folks and we’re hoping that in lowering the friction, all of you will find it that much easier to send Valentines to your favorite Tabbloers.

I know I’m looking forward to sending some to the folks whose work has brightened my days on many occasions over the last seven months.

In what was one of the most controversial features here inside of Tabblo, we’ve just launched ratings for tabblos so that you can vote your favorites to the top of the pile.

Here is how it works: for each tabblo you see on the site (except for your own) you get one vote. All of the votes are added up anonymously and the best tabblos get to go to the top of this page. Don’t try to vote more than once per tabblo because you’ll just be over-riding your previous vote.

So why was this a controversial feature to implement? Simply put because we’re all geeks here at Tabblo and we didn’t want the site turning into high school again (where the cool kids vote for each other). If everyone is giving everyone else they know a 5 on every tabblo, it’s going to be a pretty useless feature to help navigate the wealth of content on the site.

And what a wealth we’ve got! The sheer amount of stunning, beautiful, and inspiring tabblos was the reason why we ended up rolling out ratings in the end. It wasn’t that long ago that checking the “most recent” tabblos a couple of times per day was a sure-fire guarantee that you wouldn’t miss anything spectacular, but this is just not the case anymore, and as such we’re launching ratings so that you can help each other stay on top of the hottest stuff on the site.

Oh yeah, and we’ve also added a low-resolution sniffer to all of the images on any of the printed products (posters, books, cards, etc.) as well as a whole new way to make sure that no one ever gets an access denied when you’re sending them an invitation to a semi-private tabblo.

Happy 2007, y’all!

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.

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!