Does the world need another photo sharing site? Tabblo (see below) seems to think so, and a major claim to fame is its emphasis on using photos to tell a story.
Antonio Rodriguez, Tabblo’s CEO, knows a thing or two about online photo sites, having been the vice president of engineering at MyPublisher, the largest maker of photo books in the world, he says in his bio.
Tabblo uses Ajax so you may drag and drop photos into a variety of nicely designed templates to tell your photographic story. I believe you may also import your Flickr photos into Tabblo.
I didn’t see any information on the Web site about camera phones.
Why Tabblo?
“Our basic premise in starting Tabblo was that there was a functionality gap in the things one could easily do with photos online; that while Flickr defined a new mode of behavior around the photo stream constantly flowing past a community of interested users, there are still times when what one wants to do is put a bunch of photos in a context which helps to paint a picture, tell a story, or capture something particular about the subject of the photos.
“If you think about it from that perspective, what you end up wanting as a user is a more of a general purpose publishing tool that lets you work with layout, text, styling elements, and pictures.
“You can conceive of it as a special-purpose Dreamweaver, or even more like Apple's new iWeb app, but 100% in the browser, paired with a web service, built to solve some of the collaborative problems presented by multiple photographers at the same event, and aimed at hiding the complexity of basic design, technical details, and most of all, the high threshold for participation that creative tools like Quark, InDesign, and even Dreamweaver have put in the path of regular folks.”
Storytelling
Interestingly, just a few days ago picturephoning published an item about the Mobil Marathon camera phone contest (see below) that’s being held in conjunction with the Roskilde Festival, one of the largest music festivals in Europe.
Picturephoning says people attending the festival are asked to create a story based on five camera phone photos. The contest participants are able to edit their entries for a week after the last day of the festival.
Prizes will be awarded during the festival for the best image of the day as well as for the best of the entire event.
Success?
There are so many photo sharing services that it will be interesting to see whether Tabblo succeeds. I tried it, very quickly, and it seemed to work okay.
I suspect the company's viability will depend upon more innovative services to differentiate it from the crowd. Storytelling + Ajax make a nice combination, but it's not enough.
Thanks for noticing "mobilmarathon" at Roskilde. It's powered by our storytelling tools on 23, http://23hq.com.
The story format is really simple and powerful - and just is something very different from photoblogging and albumsharing.
The fact that you need to add a start and an ending get's you into the narrative very simple.
PS. The more photo sharing tools the merrier - giving users lot's of different ways to share that fits their needs and values.
Posted by: Thomas Madsen-Mygdal | Monday, May 22, 2006 at 03:15 PM
Thanks for the review Alan. We see the world just as you do-- it will be the innovative features and new services that will help to set us apart.
However we are not super interested in innovating along the photo-sharing dimension-- there are already plenty of people doing that. Tabblo's whole reason for being is in the story piece, that is the composition of photos, words, and templates, and it here that we have some neat ideas around features, and around business models.
One place that I am particularly excited about is something that is coming for 1.0 that is targeted specifically at cameraphone use so stay tuned.
Antonio
PS- I am a huge fan of the Reiter's Wireless data blog so this review really is an honor!
Posted by: Antonio Rodriguez | Monday, May 22, 2006 at 02:48 PM