When we first started moving the time spent on our computers to the web, the magic of doing things “over the network” with servers that anyone in the world could access overshadowed a lot of the limitations of the new medium. For instance, the irritating pause that came after pressing the submit button and the unending page reloads were two limitations that we were initially willing to overlook. In fact, it took 10 years (and the interface revolution unleashed by the suite of technologies known as AJAX) for us to approximate the level of interactivity that we had grown used to on the graphical desktop.

With the Tabblo Print Toolkit, we’re hoping to do to printing content from the web what the various AJAX toolkits did for interface interactivity.

Most content that lives online these days was authored for that very purpose, with print being a far distant second-class citizen. And yet there are many maps, product reviews, and blog posts/essays that for various reasons often have a need to exist on paper. But how to format them for this purpose— especially if the original content author hasn’t specified a particular scheme for it?

Enter the Tabblo Print Toolkit.

In its initial form, we’re going to be releasing a beta which consists of two parts: a Javascript widget that will help to harvest relevant content from your webpages, and a corresponding web service that will take the harvested content and turn it into print-ready PDFs for your readers.

But wait, there is more: often times, online content has different physical forms that it can take, depending on the content consumer’s goals. A travel log may for instance have a 1-page itinerary form, a map-heavy version, or a long-essay form for reliving the entire trip. In theory, even the same person may have each of these different needs as he plans, goes on, and reminisces about his trip. With the Tabblo Print Toolkit, the same online content will easily convert into each of these physical forms.

Think of it as the reinvention of the “Print Friendly” button. Except that instead of just a minimally formatted version of the webpage, we’ll be giving your site visitors something that is relevant, appealing, and custom to their needs.

Come back on June 29th for the beta release!

We’re in an article on HP’s new Web2Print (a.k.a., Web 2.0) strategy that ran in today’s New York Times and highlights the fact that we’re up to some interesting stuff to make printing a first-class citizen in this new web ecosystem.

You’ll be seeing more news about it here as it develops but for now a very quick preview: you know that really rich editing experience you get when you’re working on your tabblos? Well get ready for that to take flight and spread to all of those places on the web where you’ve been frustrated up until now— especially when you hit “print.”

Stay tuned…

We have some really exciting news for you: this morning, HP announced its intent to acquire us. The plan is to take the entire Tabblo experience— the editor, the template engine, and the output formats— and spread it far and wide across the web, and frankly, we could not be more excited.

When we launched Tabblo, the simple mission was to take bits to atoms, making the online content that results from popular activities (photo-sharing, blogging, socializing, etc.) compelling enough for users to want to print. We started with sharing photos, words, and templates because we believed the emotion and creativity involved in the act of telling stories was a great first beachhead in becoming the print engine for the web. And nine months, 150 thousand tabblos, and 5 million photos later, you guys have proven us right.

But now it is time to go out and apply our tools to even more type of content. To build new offline formats. Tabblo.com is a great place to tell the kinds of stories that you all have authored on the site, but the rest of the web deserves the same type of smooth transition form online to offline, from bits to atoms.

In the coming months, we’ll be talking more about the new types products and partnerships we are going to build together, but for now, here are the answers to the big 3 questions we know you must be asking:

1. Will Tabblo.com go away?

No, we have no plans to shut down the site - in fact, we’re going to be trying out new and different applications of our technology and we’d love your feedback on it.

2. HP already owns a photo-sharing site (Snapfish). Will Tabblo or Tabblo.com get mushed into Snapfish?

No. Our mission is completely different: we are aiming to make tools that will let us become the print engine for the rest of the web. This means a wide assortment of content that goes beyond traditional online photo sharing.

3. Do you guys still care about the Tabblo community?

Absolutely. We wouldn’t be here without you guys. You pushed and prodded and helped to make the experience what it is today. In fact— we kind of consider you our secret weapon as we move forward in developing new ways to move your content to offline formats. By all means, please keep on tabbloing and stick around to see where the fire in our bellies takes us next…

We’ve built some powerful tools here at Tabblo that enable people to combine their words and their photos to tell a story. So far our tools have been available through only one channel (www.tabblo.com), and we’ve been exploring other options. We’ve been getting good response from our contacts at private schools. So we decided to take the next step and go where Tabblo has never gone before: a trade show!

Last week, Carey, John, and I went to the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) Annual Conference in Denver. This conference is attended by more than 2000 heads of school, deans, business officers, and teachers, and a few hundred vendors with something to sell. Over the two days we were able to talk to hundreds of people about Tabblo.

As people walked by our booth, we’d ask them a question: “Do you share your photos on your school’s website?” Most schools answered “yes,” and were interested in improving the experience. They were looking for help with keeping in touch with parents and alumni, with displaying photos, with archiving photos, with keeping their website “fresh,” and with managing privacy concerns.

When we showed the powerful Tabblo editing tools to our booth visitors, they were able to see how a tabblo layout was better than a slideshow or a gallery. They understood that a tabblo can be securely shared with an audience ranging from a single family, to all parents, to alumni, and to the public. We showed them how Tabblo can be delivered using the Private Label Partnership. (Take a peek at how Tabblo looks when integrated with the Carroll School’s website, for instance).

Then we showed them the print products, and their eyes lit up. It’s one thing to see a tabblo on a screen, and it’s another to see it as a poster. Then we’d whip out the BigBook and MiniBook, and they’d really start thinking about how they can change the way they share their school’s photos. They already knew that photos helped them keep in touch with parents and alumni, but hadn’t necessarily considered graduation gifts, faculty recognition, event keepsakes, or fund raiser tools.

We like the response we got at the conference. Ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have photos and a potential audience, but would like to improve the experience?
• Would you like it to look like it is part of your website (Private Label Partnership, co-branding)?
• Do you like the easy transfer to prints, posters, and books?

If the answer is yes. . . ask us about the Private Label Partnership.

See my tabblo

Ok, I promise that this is the last post related to browsing content, ratings, etc. for a while. But this feature is cool enough to blog about.

Ned spent Saturday working on a way to navigate the site by people’s favorites list, and we’ve just pushed it live. In a nutshell what this does is let folks see who has marked a tabblo as a favorite and what else they’ve marked. It is very “web 2.0″ in that the new navigational overlay takes advantage of a gesture that you are making for yourselves (bookmarking something as a favorite) and uses it to provide a virtual tour for your fellow tabbloers.

We had discussed this feature months ago as a possible replacement for ratings but it was not until last night when I saw it on a staging copy of the site that I realized how much more powerful it can be. Give it a go by starting at any of my favorite tabblos.

One final note: since we make people’s favorites lists public (though the tabblos on those lists are not necessarily visible to everyone), this new way of navigating the site does not reveal any information that wasn’t there before. What Ned has done is expose it in a much more digestible format.

Have fun.

One of the most challenging (and rewarding) things about building a software product in the midst of a community of passionate users is knowing when a feature is being rejected by the community because it’s something new and different and when it’s really something that doesn’t jive. And to boot, online apps tend to have a symbiotic relationship with their users where features evolve based on the community and the community in turn is shaped in large part by the features that the site grows which just adds complexity to figuring these types of things out.

Most of the time we feel like we’re doing a good job of that around here but our recent introduction of ratings shows that we too can miss it. Universally controversial both inside and outside of Tabblo, ratings ended up being something that we decided to launch for two reasons: 1. to help navigate the growing wealth of content on the site, and 2. to give one more axis for feedback, mostly for people who were looking for something that was somewhere between the favorites list and the comments.

The debate on why ratings were not good for Tabblo started in the forum, continued in support emails, and culminated yesterday in a tabblo by one of our users who felt strongly enough to consider quitting Tabblo altogether. We had been working on a replacement for ratings that felt more “Tabblo” and this morning we pushed it up to the site.

Introducing, the Tabblo wink.

Where the old dreaded Netflix/Amazon/YouTube 5-star widget used to be, we now have a small Tabblo icon. If you mouse over it, you will see a “Wink if you like this tabblo.” Winks are then used as an input to determine what shows up on the “popular” page (and to avoid people who may want to game the system, we’re not quite ready to say exactly how we weigh them) but nowhere else on the site. That is, you’ll never see a “this tabblo has X winks” message, and we may just never divulge just how much a wink counts for.

I hope that this is acceptable to everyone who chimed in over the last couple of weeks on all sides of this debate (both inside and outside of Tabblo). For sure I can not promise that we won’t have other equally controversial features coming down the road, but I can least promise you that when we do, we will address the issues that come up in the same way we did with ratings— openly and collaboratively with you all.

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!

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…