So true, Om. I’m an avid flickr user, but Snapfish was my direct path to Tabblo. I’ve used it a lot, and it has the potential to offer Snapfish’s private photo-sharing as well as flickr’s community.

I write “has the potential” because Tabblo is struggling with how to integrate both sets of principles, leading to two major drawbacks:

1)Steep learning curve both conceptually - what a tabblo is - and in usability. Snapfish takes two seconds to learn, but it’s overly simple. Tabblo gives much more, but even an advanced user like myself has had to spend hours learning. It’s more like flickr in that sense.

2) Privacy management is unclear: I set everything to private but my account and photos (not tabblos) can be accessed by a Google search. That alone makes me want to return to Snapfish.

My understanding from a talk by Antonio Rodriguez is that Tabblo emerged from his work creating photo-printing services that other companies could brand. Will Tabblo retain its own brand identity, or will it become an HP thing? And will it continue to be something between Snapfish and flickr, or will it achieve an identity as something far better than either or both?

I love what they’ve done so far, so I look forward to seeing how they develop.

I blogged about this just 2 weeks ago, and I certainly wasn’t expecting another big announcement this soon!