Did someone finally listen to my pleas for better visualization of photo albums on the web? Tabblo is a local web startup that lets you create little tableaus (or Treemaps, if you wish) from photos on your computer. Tabblo lets you move photos around, resize, add captions, zoom in and out, and all that good stuff. Importing is easy with iPhoto plugins, Flickr integration, and so on. Once your photos are in Tabblo, it’s painfully hard to use! I created my first Tabblo, worked on it for 20 minutes in vain, trying to make it look the way I wanted it, and then reset it back to their default. I tried adding captions, but all the photos shifted beneath my feet and nothing ever lined up as desired. This site has too much clever magic behind it and not enough basic user testing.

Anyway, here’s my Tabblo of photos from our recent trip to London and Paris:

See my Tabblo>

Last night we went to see Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep at the Coolidge Corner Theater. A great movie and a great theater. Karl first introduced me to Gondry with a DVD he has of Gondry’s music videos, which is among our most frequently watched DVDs. It just doesn’t get old.

This movie continues Gondry’s style of whimsy and surrealism developed in the music videos and in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There isn’t a whole lot of story in The Science of Sleep, but the visuals, the characters, and the sheer creativity of it all kept me on the edge of my seat. It’s set in Paris, but mostly in five or six small rooms that morph into each other and into other worlds as dream morphs into reality. It was not clear cut like The Big Lebowski. I was always asking, “Is this a dream or a reality?” So was Stéphane, the main character, lost in his own intense creativity.

I’d like to see Gondry collaborate with Wes Anderson on a movie. Lets have Anderson write the script and Gondry bring the cardboard schizophrenia.

In a fit of vanity, I ordered an 8”x10” book of my own photography the other day:

Here’s a photo I took of a photo of me taking a photo of me and Karl in the mirror. And on the left, musical gatherings.

shades of Wolfgang Tillmans?

The book has 28 pages and came from Apple’s iPhoto book service. It was way too expensive and the printing isn’t great. The paper is thin and slick like a magazine. So while I probably won’t order another, something about the glamor of it preventing me from returning this one.

Apple needs to improve the quality and lower the price of this service. But they also need to make iMixes for photos, so I can point you to a version of this book on sale at the iPhoto Store, and in a few days you can have my art on your coffee table. If you’re my mom, that is.

Listen, I think your service is great and all, but I’m finished with it. I found a better alternative. I found some other phone company, some other bank, some other to-do list management service. They are cheaper and better, and their web site looks nice. So, I guess if I’m all done, I will just sign on to your web site and close my account.

Now, if I can just find the button that says “close my account.” Let see—“add a fax line” — “add calendaring” — “upgrade rate plan”— “open a brokerage account” — hmmmm. I know it’s here somewhere. Right? No?

Why not? I’ve never understood this frustrating barrier. It’s not just a cost for me, the customer. It’s a cost for the company, who is paying upwards of $3 to answer my call and demand that I explain in person why I’m leaving. Don’t you hate these calls? They hem and haw, they make you wait, they ask lots of questions. Suddenly all of our information age advances fade away. You could apply for a Turkmenistani passport in less time than it takes to quit some of these services. But as services inevitably become more “self-service”, this has to change. The quality of the service has to be the thing that keeps people around, not an exit barrier.

It’s funny though. Part of the logic for companies is, “Maybe they’ll stick around longer if they have to call.” Has anyone measured this? How many people actually stay with a service for a longer time just because they couldn’t find the “close my account” button?

And if they do, does it outweigh the cost of the phone call? There’s also the cost of the bad will. That is, by not providing a feature they should clearly have, the company is sending a message they might not even be aware they’re sending: “If the customer doesn’t value the relationship anymore, neither will we.” But the fact is, people quit services for a lot of reasons and often return later. Maybe they are moving away for a year. Maybe they’ll tell their friends about it. In other words, it ain’t over ‘till the customer is dead. And even then it might not be over.