The Phanfare customer survey results are in. An overwhelming majority of you want your own destination URL (yourname.phanfare.com) and optional site passwords.

I am pleased to announce that we have overhauled the Phanfare tools to support simple web hosting of your photos and videos at yourname.phanfare.com. This change will make it easier for you to use Phanfare and for your viewers to see your content. We are rolling out these changes on Thursday, June 25th, 2009. Your old Phanfare username is reserved for your use.

Phanfare’s social networking tools (adding friends, getting automatic content notifications when friends and family add content, Phanfare groups) are still in the system for those who want to use them.

Phanfare’s new sharing model is simple. Every album is either published or not to your Phanfare site. You can share URLs at an album or site level. If you have a site password set, your viewers will be asked for the password before being allowed to view.

We have created a new contact list to hold your commonly used email addresses. It will be populated with your Phanfare friends and family as well as people that were in your Phanfare address book prior to January 1, 2008.

You can also share your site and album URLs with Phanfare’s built-in email tools. The invitations to view your albums will not require viewers to sign-up to see your albums. When composing invitations to view your site, you can utilize addresses from your new Phanfare contact list.

All Phanfare tools are updated to support our new simple web hosting model. Be sure to download the latest version of your favorite tool on Thursday morning at http://www.phanfare.com/apps.aspx. The Mac and PC client automatically update themselves.

For Phanfare long-timers, you will rightly see these changes as bringing back the original Phanfare sharing model that was so adored by all of you for its simplicity and sense of ownership. Of course, it comes with all the new functionality that we have added in the time since, including an amazing iPhone and iPod touch app for managing your Phanfare site and plugins for popular tools like iPhoto, Picasa, Lightroom and Aperture. We have built conduits to move photos and videos to Facebook and Flickr. Phanfare continues to use Amazon S3 for storage, providing you the peace-of-mind that your content will be preserved for generations to come.

I am also happy to announce that we are lowering the price of Phanfare Premium to $49.99/year for all our customers, effective at your next renewal.

Again, all these changes are schedule to be released this Thursday.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009 at 3:22 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.