the onda

If it had been April Fool's day, I would have assumed that today's big New York Times/Microsoft announcement of some type of eReader software to replicate the look and feel of the print newspaper on your laptop/tablet was a joke. How could two big companies filled with clued-in people think that this was worth doing at all?

Jeff Jarvis beat me to the punch with his assessment of why this is being done (basically either out of ego or to try and pull a fast one on advertisers) so I am not going to belabor it. But it does seem fitting that this should happen this week, the same week that Smilebox launched its product with a bunch of the same underlying assumptions baked into it about how people want to consume their digital media online.

For those that don't know Smilebox is a "new way to share photos" online according to this week's WSJ Personal Technology column. I do not know them personally but from what I have heard, they are a bunch of smart ex-Microsoft guys who've built a Flash-based downloadable tool to easily compose montages of your photos and canned soundtracks which are then turned into Flash movies that can be shared. After reading the Journal piece I decided to give the app a try despite my general distaste for semi-canned Flash movies and was generally pleased with the results. In a few minutes I was able to create a couple of compelling slideshows with a cool "carousel" effect that feels almost as though it belongs in an online game world.

However, I was amazed at how far into the interface you had to dig to get at this particular type of output mostly because it was buried between "photo book" and "scrapbook" (don't ask me the difference) and a zillion template elements that all mimic the real world of glitter, deckled photo edges, paper, scissors and glue but for 100% online output. Now there are probably a lot of people that will spend hours creating these virtual books whose pages really do "turn" on-screen and whose photos appear pasted in, but as I looked at the options, all I could think of was: boy this feels like using a buggywhip as a steering wheel.

The web is a really cool new medium; it introduces a fundamentally new primitive (the hyperlink) and a whole bunch of formats that are optimized around computer displays and spotty bandwidth. Scrolling is now second nature to anyone who uses the Internet as is clicking a link, using the back button, and a whole host of other actions that don't quite have analogs in the UIs built around aping the real world objects. After all, the real genius of the Mac interface was not in putting a trash can on the Desktop but in making it behave in expected ways given the new medium of the bitmap display (imagine having to "open" the trash can every time you wanted to delete a document).

So maybe the folks at the New York Times, Microsoft, and Smilebox know something I don't about the mental model of the typical web user today– maybe they are keenly aware of a latent desire to return to a familiar pre-computer world for interfacing with data.

I hope not though because at Tabblo we're taking a whole different approach: our soon-to-be-released 1.0 product currently has one kind of thing you build, a tabblo. We went so far as to name it something new, despite it being similar to an online gallery, a photo album, a slideshow, etc. because we want to cue our users to the fact that what they are creating is something that is not quite what they've been used to doing with their photos and text before. If we've done our job right it will fill the needs fulfilled by making scrapbooks and assembling photo albums in the physical world, but in the context of the web as a medium.

Of course this doesn't mean that we don't believe in the value of the objects being directly mimicked by the "real object" interface folks– after all I just came from a place where all we did was use software to make fancy paper-and-ink photo albums so I've seen first-hand how compelling these can be– it is just that I'm not sure that what is emotionally engaging about them carries over well in the atoms-to-bits transition.