review: tabblo.beta
Posted on | June 16, 2006 | 6 Comments
tabblo is a new photo-service focused on creating and sharing gorgeous-looking photo-pages, nicknamed ‘tabblos’. tabblos can be private, public or shared with a limited group of people and are usually organized around a topic.
photos can be uploaded via browser-based file-upload, java- or flash-based upload-clients or a picasa-plugin. good news for users of flickr: the flickr-API is integrated with tabblo, allowing to import your flickr-library with just one click. once the images are uploaded, a virtual lightbox-tool is used to pick the best ones for use in the photo-page. tabblo offers about 20 predefined photo-layouts which can be styled with more than 20 themes (see screenshot below).
if you are not happy with the layout of your photo-page, tabblo offers great tools to customize it: drag and drop your photos to re-position them on the page, enlarge them, add text-blocks and captions or even add sepia- or black/white-filters to your pics. the editor as a whole gives a good sense of how ajax can be used by non-designers to customize pre-defined content-elements.
tabblo is a flexible tool, especially useful for quickly creating nice-looking mini-photo-sites (it took me about 5 minutes to put together my demo-page), plus it’s fun to play around with it… 
update: few hours ago, mike arrington pointed out that flickr is denying its competitor zooomr access to their commercial APIs… obviously interoperability between all the shiny web2.0-sites is getting more important. I just wonder why zoomr isn’t going a similar route as tabblo [the reason for this seems to be flickr, denying zooomr API-access], who really did a good job with their flickr-integration…
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6 Responses to “review: tabblo.beta”
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June 17th, 2006 @ 1:48 am
Hi there, thanks for mentioning Zooomr!
Trust me in that we would have Flickr integration if it were up to me. Tabblo is using Flickr’s API to download photos from Flickr, which is something that companies have to apply for.
While it seems that Tabblo isn’t ‘direct competitor’ enough to deem a API block, Zooomr is, and as such Flickr has refused to give us access to their API.
What this means though, on a broader scale, is that if you use services such as Flickr, you’re up to their discretion on if they want to move your already uploaded photos to other sites you would like to use — including tags.
Don’t let sites like Flickr lock you in.
Kristopher Tate
cto & founder — bluebridge tech / zooomr
June 17th, 2006 @ 2:06 am
hi kristopher.
thx for your explanation, I wasn’t aware that the tabblo<>flickr-integration is based on an API which is blocked for zooomer (or other, more direct competitors) – which, of course, is a shame.
June 17th, 2006 @ 2:09 am
Yeah, it certainly is. If you would like to let more people know, be sure to get the article dugg.
http://digg.com/technology/Why_is_Flickr_Afraid_of_Zooomr_
Thanks,
-Kristopher
June 17th, 2006 @ 3:21 pm
Hi,
Just to clarify, we’ve never had any sort of “special treatment” from the Flickr guys. We just went like anyone else to their API page, applied for a key, and wrote our integration around it. I’ve written about it before but it’s worth mentioning again: I (and all of us at Tabblo) are really impressed with how open Flickr has been with respect to allowing its users to bring over their content to Tabblo.
I have a ton of respect for the Flickr folks when it comes to openness. In fact, as we try to evolve our own API, I often hear myself in meetings making comparisons to the Flickr one and asking: how can we make it more like Flickr’s.
June 18th, 2006 @ 2:02 am
thx antonio for your comment… the remaining question is: why is flickr denying access for zooomer, while it’s allowing fiving access to tabblo?
I just hope that flickr will adapt the API-policy as outlined by stewart butterfields (read http://www.flickr.com/groups/central/discuss/72157594165399644/#comment72157594167782546)…. i.e. giving anyone, even a direct competitor like zooomer (@kris tate: sorry, but that’s exactly what you are, imho), access to the API who is itself willing to give flickr access to its users data.
June 19th, 2006 @ 1:01 am
looks like a really nice and decent foto publisher. i like the demo portfolio..simple but effective. i also looked at the other templates which are quite usefull for designlovers and appleusers..too