Thanks for sharing I digg you post.

Thank and Regards

The problem with 2.0 was that there was not much buy-in from your viewers. They hardly even realized they had accounts. They just clicked through the email notifications they got. They can still do that today; you just need to send the invitations to view out manually.

We added back in visitor tracking in the last release by click tracking people when they view albums via phanfare invitations. From 30,000 feet, it feels pretty much the same to viewers, except that the viewers don’t have phanfare accounts.

Using phanfare subsites you can create access control groups (as you did in 2.0). it is true that everyone at the same access level shares a password, but if they are clicking through invites, I doubt they even know that password. And really, for personal content, a shared password is probably not a big deal. If it is big deal, you can create a subsite for the rogue with a separate password.

Most people don’t want to bother to register to consume media. That includes your viewers. You might think you are doing them a favor by sharing it, but with personal media, I would argue they are doing you a favor by looking at it when the person is outside blood family

Anyway, right now we are running a hybrid system for those who really like the social networking features.

My current view is that phanfare is not a social network. It is a bunch of independent photo and video website publishers with their respective audiences. We will continue to develop tools to help our publishers manage their audience, that might include automatic notifications out to the audience to tell them about new content, or a way for viewers to signup in a simple manner to get notified when a phanfare site changed.

From the beginning of Phanfare 2.0 I failed to “get” the whole “social networking” idea; therefore, I never used “groups” for anything more than a means of selectively sharing photos (control).

Now, with most of the “social” aspects of Phanfare being less obvious to find and more difficult to utilize, it seems that friends, family and groups will be soon be removed. I am struggling to figure out how to administer my site without those tools. Already, it is way too cumbersome for “new” family and friends to “connect” with me. I’ve seen many references to a password for the site and passwords for individual albums, but passwords seem like a bother to manage; besides how “private” is a shared password? By the time I tell two friends, that in-turn tell two friends, and so on the whole password thing seems very much pointless. And even with passwords, there is still no “visitor reporting” available.

I’m asking that you consider keeping “social Phanfare” without “freemium Phanfare.” I don’t want Phanfare giving its services freely to “strangers.” If you are going to give free service to anyone, give it as “value added” to paying users like me. The people that come to Phanfare to see my photos expect (and gladly accept) that in order to see some of my albums, they must sign up, sign in and be accepted by me. I think the popularity of Facebook bears out that people are willing to do just that – sign up, sign in and be accepted. However, unlike Facebook, Phanfare, the service provider, does not have to *give* the registered user anything, as a paying user *I* am giving them something they want – access to my photos, and in the process Phanfare gets exposure and potential new paying users.