It should come as no surprise to anyone that I rely on Phanfare to safeguard my photos and videos. They live happily in the cloud, in their original sizes and quality and I access them from wherever I need. I strongly believe in cloud computing. I think personal computers (Windows and Mac OS) are difficult to maintain, overly complicated devices that expose too much complexity to the user.

A personal computer is best as an internet terminal, replaceable with a different computer as needed, provided you install the necessary software. And I believe in the long run most consumers won’t buy general purpose computers. But we live in the here and now.

I am not 100% converted to cloud computing in my personal life yet. There is lots of legacy stuff I setup years ago. At home I have a Mac Pro desktop with 3 drives running the latest version of Leopard. Two of the drives were purchased about 3 years ago at the exact same time: 450 GB Western Digital SATA drives. I installed them in my Mac Pro (the Pro has 4 bays) and setup a software RAID 1 (full mirror).

On my personal RAID I keep my iPhoto library (I sometimes use iPhoto as part of my workflow), my iTunes collection, in progress iMovie projects and a VMWare Windows XP instance.

Well, I got back from a business trip to find that I had basically lost the whole RAID. The RAID was not mounted. I rebooted and it mounted. I checked on it in Disk Utility and found that one of the drives were marked FAILED and the other was marked S.M.A.R.T. failure, which is a early warning system built into drives telling you it is about to fail. The RAID was marked “degraded,” which means not providing redundancy, and some information in the Disk Utility interface recommended that I replace the one drive that was hanging on and move the data ASAP. I tried, but got errors when copying the files.

So I lost all the data. No big deal. The music is on an iPod, although a few months of ITMS purchases are not synched. The photos I care about are all on Phanfare and the VMWare instance is just a standard XP config with MS Office and some other files.

But I was really trying to NOT to lose that data. I had a RAID, the drives were fairly new, the home office is climate controlled, the computer is rarely moved, we have smoke alarms and heat sensors and the computer is on a UPS to protect it from vagaries in the power grid. And yet I lost it all.

Morale of the story: Keep your stuff in the cloud. I am going to find a service that will keep my iTunes collection (anyone have experience with mp3tunes.com?) in the cloud. And I am going to finally pull the trigger and stop maintaining personal files like tax records on home servers (that is not my only RAID- the other one is a DELL HW RAID in the basement waiting for a flood).

I tried Jungle Disk and it looks pretty good. Jungle disk is a SW layer that sits atop Amazon S3 and lets you store your files on S3 and pay only Amazon’s rates for storage and bandwidth. (Note that I don’t think the average consumer needs the complexity of Jungle Disk and personal S3 accounts, but some of the underlying applications I use don’t yet have good enough online services).

If I can’t manage to keep my data intact at home, I suspect you can’t either and frankly, why try? There is simply no comparison with the type of monitoring, redundancy and security you can get from an online service versus rolling your own in your basement.

We just released a new version of Phanfare that enables more inputs and outputs so you can access your media any way you want on any device you want.

• Import from Shutterfly, Snapfish, Kodak, and Picasa web albums directly into your Phanfare account.
• Export from iPhoto to the Phanfare service using our new iPhoto plugin.
• Improved iPhone viewing experience. Just browse to Phanfare using Safari on the iPhone.
• RSS feeds to follow your Phanfare messages using iGoogle, MyYahoo, Google Reader and similar services.
• Media RSS feeds to show your albums on digital photo frames.
• Album viewing pages now have links to album editing pages if you are the owner of the album.
• Numerous bug fixes and small optimizations including support for Firefox 3.

As always, let us know at support @ phanfare.com or bugs @ phanfare.com if you have trouble using the service or want to report a bug.

For all you Apple iPhoto users out there, we are happy to announce direct support for iPhoto through a plugin that will put Phanfare in the export menu of your iPhoto application.

This is a preview release intended to help us iron out any issues before we more widely advertise the iPhoto plugin in the next Phanfare release.

The iPhoto plugin will allow you to upload any selected images in iPhoto to the Phanfare service directly. you can also create new albums, and control whether or not the album is visible to family and friends.

If you want to import a whole bunch of iPhoto albums to Phanfare at once, while retaining your iPhoto album structure, then please use the Phanfare Mac client and import the albums from that client.

We are happy to announce that we have developed a camera application for the new iPhone store that allows users to share iPhone photos on the web with a single click. The photos are moved wirelessly to the internet where they are immediately visible to friends and family and archivally stored.

We have also released a new mobile viewing experience that targets the Safari web browser built into the iPhone.

Here is a demo of the new Phanfare iPhone application and the mobile viewing experience.

The Phanfare camera application turns the iPhone into a connected digital camera that takes the PC out of the loop for uploading and sharing. Users enjoy the convenience and portability of the iPhone with all the benefits of cloud-based storage and sharing. After you take a picture, you can instantly add a caption, add the photo to an existing album or create a new album without ever leaving the application. Here is a demonstration of the new iPhone app.

For consumers, digital photography was a huge step forward over film, but uploading digital photos to a computer is just too complicated. The Phanfare iPhone app gets the computer out of the uploading loop and makes digital photography significantly more convenient.

I recently talked about Phanfare with ABC News Now for their Ahead of the Curve segment.

They were interested specifically about how Phanfare provides secure photo and video sharing for families but I spoke more broadly about what we are doing these days. They were friendly enough to just go along with the flow.

Andrew

I love products and services that are executed flawlessly. I find Broadway musicals intellectually uninspiring, but I love how the performance and production values are flawless. Everyone on stage can sing, dance, and knows their lines. These are the best of the best. The sets, transitions and lighting are all top notch. The show unfolds like origami, every aspect perfectly planned.

You would not expect to find that type of magical execution in something as mundane as a Bluetooth wireless cell phone headset but the new Jawbone is remarkable. I recently got a Jawbone after Walt Mossberg reviewed it and said the thing finally works. The performance is inspiring.

I am a bit of a stickler when it comes to cell phone voice quality. When I travel, I typically take both my Blackberry and family-share flip phone because, when in noisy places, the Blackberry picks up too much background noise to be bearable to the person on the other end of a call.

Background noise seems to be a general problem with any phone device where the microphone is far away from your mouth. To pick up your voice, the microphone needs to have a higher gain, and that means picking up background noise. The problem is exacerbated by any headset that keeps the microphone near your ear, as most Bluetooth ones do.

Ok, so how good is the new Jawbone? I made calls standing on Connecticut Avenue in Washington, DC while scooters whizzed by and the person on the other end, when asked, thought I was inside.

Then I performed the ultimate test. I made a call while driving with the windows down, sunroof open, going 40mph, with the radio playing loud enough for me to enjoy it inside the car. The person on the other end reported he could hear something in the background but could not make it out. When I switched back to the handset for comparison, the other party asked that we please end the experiment immediately. It was torture.

The real significance of the Jawbone is the increased utility of your cell phone. While it is an attractive idea to make a business call while walking on the street, the background noise is usually so loud that it would be insulting to the other party. But with the Jawbone, the other person thinks you are inside!

How does the Jawbone work? They read the vibrations off your face and use it as a reference signal to filter the audio. Audio that tracks the signal coming off your face is accepted, other audio is rejected. Great idea. Of course, the devil is in the implementation details and with the new Jawbone, they finally got it right.

Only caveats? Wireless headsets are a bit of a hassle since they need to be charged separately, and of course, wearing a Bluetooth wireless headset makes you look like a bit of a dork. But since the thing actually works, and as an Engineer, I really can’t completely lose the dorkiness anyway, those are drawbacks worth living with.

(Note, it seems that Amazon only has the older Jawbones stocked. I bought mine off the Jawbone company website. Took about a week to come)

By popular demand, we have put open public albums back into the Phanfare service in a release that went out today. This means that you can publish your albums for all to see at a URL that you can send via email or put on a web page.

We did this as a result of overwhelming feedback from our customers that they want to share without requiring people to register to view.

We are also enabling email invites to view that to go unregistered users. Collectively, these two changes will make the social networking features in Phanfare optional. Use them if you want them.

For those keeping track, we made a set of changes to Phanfare in December, collectively known as Phanfare 2.0, that traded the old website hosting model for one that layered social networking on top of Phanfare. We did this out of a belief that social networks, like facebook, are a fun and collaborative way to share photos and videos.

What our customers told us though was that they valued Phanfare because it was not a walled garden and that the strict social networking permission model was too constrained for them. We took a hard look at what makes the Phanfare service special and decided that being an open platform for storing your photos and videos in the cloud was our core. The social networking within Phanfare remains for those who want to use it. At the same time, we have enabled our customers to display their photos and videos on other social networks if they please.

To that end, we recently released the Phanfare facebook app that will allow you to pick and choose which albums you display to your Facebook friends.

Personally, I actually like the social networking features of Phanfare 2.0 and use them with close friends and family. But I also publish a subset of my albums from Phanfare to my facebook profile. And I enjoy my Phanfare photos on my living room TV via our media server that integrates with the Playstation III and Xbox 360. And I have my screensavers set to show content from friend and family albums.

Aside from open public albums, we also released another user-facing feature today: Editing of photos in Picnik.

We have always had fairly full featured editing in our downloadable applications, and now with the Picnik integration, you can edit photos on the web too. Tell us what you think of it.

We have made some improvements to the Phanfare service. The big news is that we have significantly reduced the gap between the web client of Phanfare and the downloadable clients for managing your account. This will allow you to most everything you need to do from the web (viewing has always been on the web).

New web client features:

• Music upload/import from itunes. From the album option menu you can upload an mp3 or import from itunes using a java applet. Only thing missing is music preview.

• Style picker. If you click on “change style”, you will see the full list of album styles.

• Reorder sections. If an album has multiple sections, you can change the order of the sections.

• Move images. If you select images and click on “extras” you will see the option to move images to another album. (This is a cut and paste, not copy and paste.)
• Image detail. From image detail, you can view and edit captions. Plus, clicking on info includes a link to get external links for individual photos and videos.
• Clicking “preview slideshow” will play the slideshow and leave you on the album page when it is over.
• From any album, you can click on “show all albums” to see a view of all of your albums.
• Drag and drop. You can drag and drop images directly onto the java uploader, including from iphoto and picasa.

Other than image edits and transforms, the web interface has almost all of the management functionality that the desktop applications have.

Other features in this release:

• Friend Finder. There is now a place on your Phanfare home page that shows you connections of your connections that you might want to connect with. From the “see more” link you will also have the opportunity to search your email address book for contacts that are already on Phanfare.
• Inviting friends/family to a group. There is now a link that allows you to choose existing friends/family to invite to a group without having to re-enter their email addresses.
• Visitors by day. This report now shows you the names of the visitors who came on each day.
• Slideshow changes. Added the names to appear under the buttons in the slideshow controls. Fixed a bug where videos were playing only in smallest rendition in many instances.
• New privacy setting. If you don’t want visitors to your shared albums or even friends of friends to be able to ask you to connect, you can choose to only allow connection requests from people who know your email address.

If you have a favorite feature that is missing from Phanfare today, please post it in the comments.

I am excited to announce the availability of the Phanfare Media Server for Phanfare 2.0, a small program that runs on your PC to publish your Phanfare photos within your home network. The new Playstation III supports UPnP viewing of your photos, as does the Xbox 360. There is also a digital picture frame on the market from Digital Spectrum that supports the protocol. TVs will also support the protocol directly within the next 12 months. Here is a demonstration of a Playstation III playing Phanfare photos in the office. We installed the media server on a PC on the office network and then browsed to our photos on a TV connected to a Playstation III.

We wrote the media server program using the Phanfare API. The UPnP protocol is similar to the Bonjour protocol that Apple uses to allow iTunes to share music and Apple TV to show content. If there is someone out there who knows how Bonjour works and wants to write a version of our media server for the Mac, please let us know.

The new media server joins a growing list of ways to access your photos and videos whenever and wherever you want. We call this “inputs and outputs.”

• Screensavers for the Mac and PC that can turn any computer into a digital picture frame. You login with your Phanfare 2.0 credentials and choose your content, or content of friends and family.
• The Phanfare facebook app that can show your Phanfare photos and videos to your facebook friends.
• John’s background switcher will refresh your windows wallpaper periodically with a Phanfare image.
• The Phanfare Aperture plugin will allow you directly export photos from Apple’s Aperture program to Phanfare.
• The Eye-fi wifi SD memory card will wirelessly upload photos from your digital camera to your Phanfare account.

Many of these programs were written by the Phanfare community. If you write something useful with the Phanfare API, let us know. If we like it we will promote it for you and provide you with a free lifetime Phanfare account.

At Phanfare, we want to enable you to access your photos and videos from any device you want, whenever you want. We will never hold your content hostage.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the Phanfare facebook app. Once you install the app within your facebook account you can

• Show your Phanfare photos and video albums to your facebook friends.
• Choose whether to show your Phanfare friend content and/or your Phanfare family content.
• Have your recent albums appear on your facebook profile
• Have facebook friends click through to see any particular album or all your albums.

You must be a Phanfare 2.0 registered user to use the facebook app, but you do not need a Phanfare account to view Phanfare content on facebook.

We have always been about not holding your data hostage at Phanfare and the the facebook app is just one more way that you can share your photos and videos.

Personally, I have my Phanfare friend content published to my facebook account but my family content is not. I use Phanfare to connect with my close-in friends. At facebook, I have a wider set of old friends and acquaintances.

The Phanfare app is brand new and still has not gone through the facebook review process. Hence, it is not published in the app directory. You can install it by clicking on the Phanfare facebook about about page and adding the app. You will need to be logged into facebook.