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.

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…

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…