i’m switching

Taken from the Wall Street Journal Morning Edition 6-22-06

"This week, we reviewed the beta (or pre-release) version of a new photo-sharing Web site called Tabblo (www.tabblo.com), from Boston-based Tabblo Inc., that will be officially released on June 30. Tabblo differs from other Web-based sharing sites. It's a so-called "Web 2.0" service, meaning it functions like a software application, offering features like dragging and dropping and editing all on the same Web page, without the annoying constant reloading that characterizes so many photo sites.

Tabblo also puts special emphasis on presentation, allowing you to arrange your photos in collages and designs with descriptions, rather than as straightforward slideshows, so as to add a little flair and style to your photos. The company calls these photo montages "tabblos." If you really like the tabblo that you create, you can order high-quality printed posters of them in 11×17 inches for $10, or 8.5×11 inches for $8."

The process for building a tabblo is straightforward. Three tabs labeled View, Upload and Make at the top of the screen walk you through the steps. In View, you can see all of the tabblos that you've already made, as well as a list of those in your circle of friends. In Upload, we quickly added photos to our Tabblo accounts using Java uploader, one of five options offered by the site. Integrating your photos from Flickr.com — another photo-sharing site — is one of the five options, if you have an account.

The Edit Tabblo section was especially impressive. We easily dragged photos all around the screen, seeing which fit in the best places of our collage layout and automatically swapping out other images. It was smooth and quick, exactly like working in a full-blown program stored locally on a PC, instead of a Web site stored on a distant server.

When we moused over each photo, buttons and controls appeared. These included a Remove Picture button and four on-screen editing options in the top left of each image: Collapse, Scale & Pan, Show Effects and Rotate Photo. Scale & Pan was very useful, instantly showing a window in which we could zoom in or out and pan around the image. Show Effects altered the image to black and white, sepia, oil paint or negative style.

All of these changes took just a few seconds for each image — quite a switch from the constant refreshing and reloading of Web pages that are commonplace on other photo-sharing sites.

A box filled with more editing options is constantly present at the right of your screen, offering options for changing text colors, background colors and other settings. After tweaking to our heart's content, we continued on into the Share Tabblo section. Here, we could opt for our tabblo to be seen by anyone, just those in our circles, people we invited or just ourselves.

If your tabblo is set to Public or sent to someone using an invitation, those viewing it won't have to sign in. If the tabblo is sent to those in your circle, those people must sign in with their Tabblo account information, which they'll already have (by being in a circle). This week, Tabblo will introduce a shareable link which can be sent to others for use without login credentials."

 

something to add which wsj didn't cover – there are several upload options other than integrating a flickr account.  you can add a picasa plugin, install a java uploader, or a flash uploader for multiple photo uploads. otherwise there is the traditional browse and upload one photo at a time….

i just integrated it with my flickr account and it didn't add all of my photos.  must be a beta bug, but if i were to install a desktop tool i could add all photos whether they were on flickr or not

upload time is a bit on the slow side but other than that it's great

 

a little something called avvenu

i used to use motoshare to share files between my PC and my motorola phone. Motorola has since upgraded to a service called Avvenu and I believe it's available for other phones as well.

There's 2 options with Avvenu. You can have a free account with limited storage or you can buy an account ($29.99 and it gives you 3/5 GB storage – there are options as to which size you choose)

I have the free version. All I have to do is open a browswer window on my phone and log into Avvenu, the rest is pretty simple.

I like that any time you change an option on your account you have to re-enter your password. Gives me a little more peace of mind for securty, although if someone found out my password it really wouldn't matter…..

This service isn't recommended for people who don't have an internet plan already on their phone as it can be expensive to be uploading those KB's.

Try it out!