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

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?

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 ]

According to a Pew study most people do not blog for money but in order to express themselves, and when considering subjects, most prefer personal stories over covering politics, tech., etc.

This is music to our ears as we built Tabblo to facilitate story-telling with photos and words instead of just the latter. By including visuals in the story-telling process, we’re hoping to open up the web as a medium for a whole bunch of people who would say “huh?” if you offered them a blogging platform for self-expression but who have the same story-telling itch to scratch as most of today’s bloggers.

Another interesting nugget from the story is that 55% of bloggers write under a pseudonym. This could be because of the nature of the content, but our theory is that most blogging tools are too coarse-grained when it comes to who can view the stuff, and that as such, folks are sometimes left feeling “safer” under a pen name. In the case of Tabblo, this is why we’ve spent so much time tuning the access-control system. We know that it has caused some bumps and bruises along the way, but we’re hoping to continue to make it better for you so that none of you ever feel compelled to create your tabblos as “Publius.”

Meanwhile, let’s all get back to telling some stories…

Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Eddie and I work on the Tabblo team. Nice to meet you.

I have focused a lot of my efforts here into making sure we had a jump start on good uploaders. Uploading is one of those necessary evils for a photo site. We want Tabblo users to spend the bulk of their time creating beautiful stories about their lives, not waiting for files to upload. And though we have not yet seen the realization of our grandest dreams in this regard, we are making steady progress. We have forms-based, Flash, Java and ActiveX uploaders, as well as a steadily improving Flickr integration that allows Flickr users to quickly leverage all the pain they already spent uploading to Flickr without having to go through it again at Tabblo. We have an iPhoto plugin that allows users of the default photo album manager on the Mac to upload their photos and make a story in just a few clicks. I’ve written but not yet released an experimental Windows shell extension uploader as well — this one I’m on the fence about, since it’s written in .NET. All that aside, though, what I really came here to write about was Tabblo’s unique Picasa extension.

I came across Picasa and Hello in 2004 or early 2005. At the time, I had been thinking a lot about the fact that I was frustrated by the lack of photo integration options in Blogger — one of my personal websites involves a lot of reviewing and picture-taking, and so having a place to land a lot of text and a lot of photos is really important to me. Blogger by itself didn’t really give me what I wanted. Enter Picasa and Hello. Besides being a good photo album tool in its own right, Picasa floored me with its integration into Blogger, not because I was unaware that Google had bought up Blogger too, but because I couldn’t believe how dead-on they were in seeing this problem domain and trying to offer a solution. To my mind, the idea of integrating photo sharing into a messenger-style app and then integrating that into an album manager and a blogging tool was a fresh and plausible leap in the right direction.

Fast forward a few months and I’m joining Tabblo to take another stab at that problem from a different direction. As I reach the upload problem, you can imagine how I envision the solution from a distance:

• web uploaders: Forms, Java, Flash, ActiveX
• importers: Flickr
• client apps, Mac: iPhoto
• client apps, Windows: …Picasa!

But, as I start doing research into Picasa, I find that there’s nothing out there in the way of plugins. The closest thing I find is the ability for people to create their own custom album formats by introducing new exporter XML descriptions (from what I understand). Though this could come in handy later, it’s not going to solve the problem I want to solve of getting photos from Picasa right into Tabblo with no intermediate steps. Drat.

Over Christmas, however, I had another chance to take a closer look at Picasa, and I found a way to get exactly what I needed. Some hacking and hard work later, and the Tabblo Picasa extension was born. If you’ve not yet seen it in the wild, the extension puts a new button labelled ‘Send to Tabblo’ right next to BlogThis! in Picasa’s album manager interface. All you need to do to get your photos onto Tabblo is select some photos from your Picasa albums, click the ‘Send to Tabblo’ button, enter your Tabblo login, and voila, your Picasa managed photos end up on Tabblo available for storytelling! As far as I know, this extension is a one-of-a-kind for Picasa, and we’re more than psyched to bring it to our users.

When I left the Mac for a PC, I really missed iPhoto. But now Windows (and Linux!) users can grab Picasa and the Tabblo Picasa extension and get a really powerful combination of photo management and sharing tools. We hope you’ll try out our extension and let us know what you think. Write some comments here, or post on our forums!
~e

p.s. Picasa just released a new version that has a web albums tool built in. This upgrade is currently in beta and available only to invitees that sign up at picasa.com. I got my hands on a copy today, and I found out that with a slight modification to the Tabblo Picasa extension, it will work with this new version of Picasa. So if you’re one of the Picasa beta users, we’ll be releasing our updated installer early next week at the latest. All you’ll have to do is run the new Tabblo Picasa extension installer after your Picasa upgrade, and then restart Picasa. So stay tuned!

Launch week here at Tabblo has been quite an experience. We spent the last half of last week feverishly polishing the software, testing, going over details with our printers, and generally trying to make sure everything was perfect for launch.

The weekend was more of the same, but conducted over IM from disparate locations as we tried to celebrate Mother’s Day while still working toward Monday’s opening day. Generally, the last minute work was focused on improving the code we’d already written, but being passionate users of Tabblo, we actually implemented four new features over the weekend! I’ll leave it to you to figure out which they are…

Monday was the big day, and we were excited to watch what happened. What happened was a lot of people came to the site, and the servers had some difficulty keeping up at first. We had engineered them to handle that load, of course, but we had never had the opportunity to see them under real use by that many users, so we spent the morning watching, analyzing, tweaking, and improving the infrastructure. We had a few instances of overzealous engineers making “improvements” that actually broke something, but we were able to get things back on track quickly.

By lunch time, the servers seemed happy and humming along, and we could start to focus on what users were actually doing and saying. It’s a wonderful feeling to have something you’ve been working on for so long finally be available to the public and see what they do with it.

The past week has been a wild ride, with a lot of work, a lot of stress, but much more: excitement, satisfaction, and pride.