I must say I'm impressed. Liesel Pollvogt opened up a test version of Tabblo for us today; and what fun am I having!

Tabblo aims to be the best place online to put together photos, words, and template-driven customizable design for the purpose of telling stories that can be securely shared, collaborated on, and printed in innovative ways. that's the official version. Basically it can be used as a showcase for images with text accompaniments. Features abound - upload options linking to Flickr and Picassa, various layouts for your display page , colour themes for the same. Print options to EZPrint have been added too. Then you can add text both to individual images and as blocks of text next to images; all managed by drag and drop.

This drag and drop applies to photos too. There is a lightbox for holding images while you arrange them and then there is a marvelous resize corner drag and drop facility. While this is not fully reform, images snap to an underlying grid, it is still very cool. All worked smoothly on my IE7 Beta install. Although I ran into a niggley problem trying to arrange a new image and place it where I wanted. It seems you can only swap images not place them in a new spot. When you do swap any resizing you have imposed holds in the position it was placed in and is not attached to a specific image.

The 'event' section is interesting too. It lets you reserve an email address where anyone can email in pictures and automatically have them populate your photo library and even generate a 'tabblo'. Basically it just makes it really easy to collect pictures from multiple photographers at an event.

The illustration here is of four pictures I uploaded, lightbox to the right, with the St Paul's/Millennium Bridge image resized. The style is Polaroid on a Vendome theme.

Founded in 2005 Tabblo is based in Cambridge, Mass with a spirited team of nine. These new features should be live - as they take off the beta moniker - by the time you read this.

I asked what the future holds for Tabblo. The team tell me that the next major release will be focusing around the 'community aspects' of the site. This will enable users to both pool their content together more easily, and find relevant areas of the site where they can meet other like-minded Tabblo users. On the tool front they will be adding a number of new image effects and template elements, while a new media type is also mooted to be in operation by the end of the year.