Your service kindly emailed me the options for sending out the album without asking people to sign up. In order to do this, it appears, I must pay $55 a year and deal with the following:

- No address book to keep and manage my email addresses
- No security on the album- anyone can forward my email and anyone can go in. Strangers can see my child in the bathtub and I will have no idea.
- No way to track whether or not people I have invited via email to see the albums have seen it- so if I am using the wrong email address, I will never know.
- No album-level security- i.e. I can’t control who sees what album- so if I have dinner with a group of people and want those pictures to be private just for our group for some reason, I can’t do that.

Please, please, just give us an option of Phanfare 1.0. It was the best service on the web. I am demoing SmugMug and it is so poor but I will be forced to sign up for it if things don’t change, quickly.

Teddy Roosevelt also said “The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.” It’s ok to make mistakes, let’s just acknowledge it and give the people what they want- Phanfare 1.0!

Phanfare 2.0 just totally sucks because people have to sign up to view photos.
That’s plain stupid.

I’ve read the unhappy posts in forum and comments here.
The response from Phanfare is just brainless: keep telling us how great 2.0 it is with the useless social networking feature, and how much better the 2.0 authentication system is.

That’s one lesson of how going to so-called web 2.0 is such a bad idea.

But i just wanted to let you know that you’re doing probably the stupidest thing you could possibly do by not listening to your customers complaints and allowing them all to bail out to another service that basically offers what you used to ie: smugmug.com, etc.

the funny thing is later one, you’ll realize you F’ed up bigtime and try to entice people back with the “classic” service- and here’s where you’ll really feel the sting, cuz no one trusts you now, and we will have all spent extra time and money (you stole my money by the way with this bait & switch)
setting up elsewhere and will NEVER come back.

you need to to fire whoever the geniuses who came up with this one are..

It is amazing that with endless comments on how unhappy people are, you respond by telling people how they are mistaken. We, YOUR CUSTOMERS, are not mistaken. We get it. We understand what you are trying to do. We just think you are wrong! It is amazing that with all this negitive feedback, you don’t step back and say… ‘maybe we made a mistake… Maybe we should listen to those loyal people who help pay our rent and put food on our table… Maybe we should think about how we are betraying the trust of those who took us at our word.’

But no, you just blather on about how you think your are doing something great. There is nothing great about the changes you are making; you are just following the pack. 10 years ago it was the desire to make every site “sticky.” Now there was a great concept…

What you are doing is hurting people. People counted on Phanfare to maintain thier history. You threw that trust into the trash heap!

Maybe a year from now you will decide to become a match making servce; clearly you don’t really seem to understand how to make a profit.

Here is an idea, instead of changing Phanfare, sell it to someone who knows what they are doing and repects the customer base.

Peter

Why can’t you allow users to view albums without registering if they do not wish to do so? Provided that the registration and linking to others offer additional features, you would expect that most people would end up registering anyway. Still, you would provide additional convenience to a large chunk of your customers who like to occasionally send their pictures to their casual acquintances and co-workers (yes, I understand there is a linking option for a single album, but quite frankly, I do not think that’s adequate).

I was very reluctant to go to 2.0 – as I am totally opposed to making people register to see photos. It is annoying when people send me a link, that makes me “register”. Frankly, I just exit the page and do not register. However, the external link feature of 2.0 works well enough. People who used to be able to browse my photo albums, are the ones most likely to sign up. So 2.0 works for them. Those who only looked at the one album, well they are the ones I keep sending external links.

Some of the comments that have been posted are out of line.

Best wishes.

-RB

You really had a nice product (for which I’ve referred several of my friends) and it’s a shame your company is losing so many customers due to this bad decision. I have no intention in “upgrading” to a horrible new product. Your “upgrade” path is comparable to Microsoft’s…

Many people have told me that they used to recommend phanfare all the time to friends and family. that is great, but it did not result in a significant numbers of registrations for us. So somewhere between the recommendation and the reality there was a problem. And that is because explaining the benefits of cname support to the average person on the street is impossible. that is a geek concept.

Phanfare 2.0 does not have this problem. For the vast majority of potential users, phanfare 2.0 is better than 1.0. that some percent of our users hate it is unfortunate, but I am confident that this was the right move for phanfare to assure long term viability. ore people like 2.0 than hate 2.0, especially if you look at the universe of potential users.

Phanfare 2.0 has over 75,000 registered users and is now producing conversions to paying at nearly the rate tht 1.0 was, at only about 10% of the marketing budget. Hence, this is a better business for us.

The ultimate goal of business is to create a customer. The 2.0 orientation will ultimately allow us to serve more customers.

Andrew

I think possibily the person is referring to their website and then a redirect….

I do NOT give “YOURNAME.phanfare.com” to my friends and family….I give my personal website address, which my husband and I have had for over 8 years now, and for the photo sharing part, it redirects to the phanfare site.

Today my husband and I have been trying to get Gallery 2.0 to work on our site to share photos, and it is just nothing like Phanfare’s (1.0) features….each day that June approaches, I am more disappointed. But, maybe it will free up my time on the computer. I share photos of my 4 babies for my mom and mother-in-law for the most part, as well as sisters, cousins, friends, all thousands of miles apart.

I only just joined up on Phanfare 1.0 a few months ago, after reading reviews online! Phanfare got the best reviews. I never would have signed up and spent hours putting my photos online and getting my friends and family used to it if I knew 2.0 was coming. I must have missed that small print somewhere when I registered and paid $50 upfront.

I will be leaving Phanfare and hope for a prorated refund as I will not be emailing my friends and family asking them to register on a site. If I had wanted to do that, I would have signed up with a site like Kodak, where I could print directly. Maybe smugmug is where I should go….did do a demo, but was a bit lost….do like that it is connected with Blurb though for photo book making.

Anyway….best regards.

I really don’t understand the vigor of everyone’s arguments. Is it really that bad to ask people to create a username/password for a free gig of storage space?

I’m a big phanfare friend, and am recommending it to all family and friends. Thanks Andrew, for your candor in addressing customers directly. I appreciate it, and it’s rare to see that sort of engagement in a CEO.

If we decide not to continue on with 2.0, they have offered us pro-rated refunds and help with getting our content. They have also suggested other sites that may better suit our needs once 1.0 is no longer available.

Brian — if you have it all figured out, perhaps you should be the next person to create a photo and video sharing site similar to Phanfare 1.0. I’ll be the first person to sign up! I can tell you that I’m far from being an expert in this market or business model and will stay away from telling someone else exactly how to run their business.

I will say, however, that I continue to be heartbroken over the move to 2.0 but haven’t yet decided if I’ll move to SmugMug before June or give 2.0 a chance. I’m still keeping my fingers crossed that Andrew, Mark and their team can come up with a way to keep the 1.0 functionality that we all know and love.

The social networking space is already cluttered as mentioned and I’m sorry to say I don’t think a picture site is something you can build around when other social networking sites already have this as a feature, not the core.

This just looks desperate and a me-too type of move that reminds me the old dot com models that went down the tubes.

I’m sorry if that’s offensive but that’s my honest opinion about it. I’ll be moving over to smugmug. I appreciate the pointers over to that business, but this business move just seems bizarre, and why the old functionality couldn’t have been preserved along side the new one, is beyond me.

Well anyway good luck.

We are looking into integrating external links better into the sharing flow so you can send a message to someone outside Phanfare and bring them in to see a single album in isolation.

Andrew

Andrew

Enough with the breast-beating about how courageous you and your colleagues are. The truth is that you’re incompetent and arrogant. You provided a service to a sizeable customer base, and you forgot that in the internet era, unilateral imposition of changes that hurt and shrink that customer base are not courageous but stupid and ultimately self-defeating. Enjoy your TR quotes, because in the next 12-24 months, you’ll have a lot of time to read while you’re unemployed and your defunct business is added to the list of dot-bombs.