Ink Interview: Antonio Rodriguez [tabblo]

Daily Ink

Stored in: Interviews

Posted On: September 25 2006

By: Bryan Partington

Archival Photo

Antonio Rodriguez is the founder and CEO of Massachusetts based tabblo, an "online application for putting together photos and words with styled templates that can be customized by the author for the purpose of telling a story."

I enjoyed the service so much that I wrote a review of the service last week, after playing with the beeste extensively.

As a follow up, I thought it'd be swell to find out a little bit more about tabblo from the inside out .. So I contacted Mister Rodriguez for a little chat about tabblo, flickr integration, scrapbooking and the API enabled web.

It's fallish with just a tinge of summer left in the air. That means sunny blue skies and about 56 degrees.

One of my favorite quotes is from an obscure English novel called Waterland by Graham Swift:

"Children, only animals live entirely in the Here and Now. Only nature knows neither memory nor history. But man- let me offer you a definition- is the story-telling animal. Wherever he goes he wants to leave behind not a chaotic wake, not an empty space, but the comforting marker-buoys and trail signs of stories. He has to go on telling stories, he has to keep making them up. As long as there's a story, it's all right. Even in his last moments, it's said, in the split second of a fatal fall- or when he's about to drown- he sees, passing before him, the story of his whole life."

I like it so much because I think it defines so much of what we do in our lives across all sorts of different activities. In the case of scrapbooking (the offline kind), people are clearly driven by the need to tell stories within the confines of the craft. The glitter, the glue, and the scissors are just supporting technologies for the narrative that unfolds as you flip through the pages of a well-done scrapbook.

In the case of Tabblo, we started from very much the same premise: how can we build software that makes it easy and rewarding for people to tell stories. We naturally gravitated towards photos because most people take lots of them and because they are so rarely used for effective story-telling online. We then focused on bringing in your words as an equal participant in the tabblo. And finally, we wanted the templates to feel very rewarding from the get-go so that as a user you got to immediately feel the rush of "composing." Then after you've made a few tabblos, you will naturally gravitate towards wanting to customize the template to make it more "your own" and (hopefully) to enable better story-telling.

We love flickr as I've written about in our blog ( We heart flickr). And they've been very good to us by granting us a commercial API early on, by lending us some of their most creative community members, and by continuing to push the envelope forward in community-based photo sharing. From a brief email exchange, it seems that Stewart considers us complementary to them which is exactly how we see ourselves, so that also seems like a good thing.

So we've had a spec for a Tabblo API that closely matches the internal API we use here for some months now– literally it is just a matter of slowing down a bit to make it happen. Since we do a lot of real-time image transform, and since a pretty sophisticated template engine underlies most of what you see on the site, we think we'll have some pretty compelling services to export to the rest of the web real soon now.

What has been most amazing are the members who start from pretty ok-to-mediocre pictures and build a really compelling narrative around say, a corkscrew dancing, a cat falling off of a chair or any other sort of everyday thing you might see and not take notice of.

Loads. Right now we're pretty busy adding new physical products to the mix that our members are asking for. After we are done getting all of the stuff ready for the Q4 buying season, we're going to be launching a couple of subscription services for people that are using Tabblo heavily in their business or community.

And of course, on the social front, you can expect finer control over your own personal space on Tabblo. From customized profile pages to Tabblo mini-widgets, the whole point of this vector of development is to make our most active users more comfortable in building and extending their own little piece of Tabblo.

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