I miss the automatic notification feature, users told me they looked forward to receiving them and seeing my latest efforts with a camera. I would like to see this added back in as it is cumbersome to have to send out notifications for every new album.

The new Phanfare interface looks good but the reason for all the noise was basically a lack of communication between Phanfare and us, the subscribers. I saw the new interface even before I received the email telling me about it. Naturally, I was a bit put out that major changes had taken place without any notice or expanation. Maybe get marketing involved next time to send out snippets, news and preview items so that there are no surprises and you will benefit from a better launch acceptance.

My future changes wishlist:
Send me the email addresses or IP address of viewers not on my Contact list.
Upload plugin for Photoshop CSX or Bridge.

We did put automatic notifications
back in before launch. But we only emailed the folks that were using them.

We will try to educate customers how they work in the next newsletter.

I am a bit confused. By this feature, will everyone be able to view my photos or can I make them private?

you can make your albums private if you desire. and if you publish them to
your phanfare site, you can optionally add a site password that a potential
viewer would need to know.

One feature I will miss most is the Phanfare Photon iPhone App's ability to show linked accounts. This was the number one time saver for us to push out changes to everyone in our circle.

Are you thinking about ability for Photon to subscribe to the other users subsites? Will your feedburner style system address the Photon users?

we see the iphone app more as a way to control your own account and will
continue to make improvements in the way your phanfare sites show up on the
ipad in mobile safari. the last piece for that is an HTML5 slideshow, not a
small task but not impossible.

I agree, phanfare social networking is complicated and requires others to log-on (additional password and user to remember)

Here is some data from a recent survey sent only to people who use the Phanfare social network. We consider 25% of our customers to be social network users in that they made at least one album visible to the phanfare social network in the last six months. Some may not realize that they did not have to do that to share. 68% of the "social network users" say they won't miss the social network. 32% will miss the social network and feel that there features in it that are not adequately replicated elsewhere in Phanfare.

So that means that 8% (32% of 25%) of our customers will miss the social network.

Of that 8%, the greatest concern is losing automatic notifications, shared by 82% of the people who will miss it. To address that need, we will build a feedburner style system that will allow viewers to subscribe (for free) to email updates for any given Phanfare site or subsite.

The second largest concern is losing fine-grained viewer reports (72% of the 8%). But there is actually very little loss of reporting fidelity using our sharing invites since we do click-track when viewers click and cookie browsers. The only anonymous folks are ones who type in your URL and know the password. I don't believe people will notice much difference in the reporting once the social network is out, but we will see.

62% of the 8% are concerned about losing fine-gained access control over who can view. This can be mitigated somewhat through the use of subsites. In the limit, if you created a subsite for each viewer, you have reproduced ACLs (although I will admit this is a tedious solution).

25% of the 8% are concerned about the removal of Phanfare groups. This is 2% of our customers overall. We hope that the drop box feature can address some of their concerns, but i suspect that we will need to do more here. However, once you get into the 2% of customers range, you have to ask yourself whether it would be better to address the product priorities of the other 98% first.

We are going to go ahead with the release this Thursday because it is bundled with a great new web client. But we will commit to building the notification system in the next release. The rest we will build as needed.

We appreciate all the comments. We are ultimately accountable to all of you and want to do what is right for our customers. I am certain we are representing the majority viewpoint of our customers by removing the social network. We have not even offered it to new customers for nearly six months. But to the extent we can accomodate everybody, we will.

Phantastic accountability and responsiveness. You all are truly to be commended for your dedication and thoughtfulness. Keep up the great work. I wish more companies could operate with the same principles.

It's difficult for me to conceptualize how the new Phanfare system will work, however I'm not certain that I'll be happy without the social networking aspect. If it's not broken don't fix it. Thank you.

Pleas remove the social networking feature. It is not useful. Thank you.

Please do not remove social networking feature, there are essential to phanfare. A lot of people don't want to share their phanfare pictures in FaceBook, this is not the same level of networks. One of your greatest value was this social network. The other one was to keep original files stored in your system. You already have removed partially original video storage files, but if you remove now social networking features, main reasons to have chosen Phanfare are disappearing... This is not fair to your users that have been confident in your development since the beginning and that have supported you paying your services also from the beginning! It is a very bad decision, I hope you will revert it. Thanks.

Phanfare didn't have social networking in the beginning. It was essentially an experiment that didn't really catch on for the last 2 years (of which the last few months it was already being phased out for new customers)

Hello,

I am really unhappy about this. This is a tool that is absolutely essential in what I do--which requires access control, sharing in groups, and stability of the service since I share with people well into their 70's and older. If I think I'm unhappy, wait until my computer illiterate cousins try to figure it out. i already have digital back up through Mozy. I am uncomfortable with having my images out there being anonymously viewed. I need the control to access--my kids are on there! I will be shopping for another place that has what you had--now you are looking like a pretty generic photo site and there are others that I don't have to pay for. Flickr works fine. Please don't dump the service I rely on for my genealogy. I will shop for another place that works for what I need.

I'd like to add my two cents on that ... I deliberately steered clear of facebook and other services because of the lack of control/security, and I plugged Phanfare to the rest of my extended family because it was so easy to share and upload ... and keep photos secure and not anonymously viewed. Right now, I do maintain some subsites which are password protected, but I cannot always tell who has visited the site . This needs to be tightened up for those of us who have relied on Phanfare's privacy and security for our photos. Please tighten this up before getting rid of Family/Friends/Groups!

Hi Andrew,
Just another thought ... Is there anyway that several different Phanfare accounts can contribute to a single subsite/site with albums from their own accounts? In other words, we each have albums that we have ownership over (in our own accounts), but we want them to be collectively available on ONE site by linking those albums to that site, without having to go through the process of uploading multiple times.
Also, I don't really understand how RSS is working, as I tried to set up an RSS link, but I don't get anything updated even after I've added albums, added new photos to albums, published new albums, etc. I'm trying to test it out to see how easy it would be to update other family members of new albums, so far it's not working.

Sites/subsites can have a drop box. This allows guests to upload photos. They will appear in your account, private, as 'Dropped Off By John' for example. You can them make sure everything in the album is something you want on your site, maybe change the name, and publish it.

The RSS link should show you the 5 newest albums in your account by date. If this isn't what you are seeing write into support with the link and we can take a look.

I know about the drop box feature, but this would involve my various family members uploading their pictures multiple times in order to have them displayed on different sites. Not only is it redundant and tedious, but the privacy of those photos is compromised because we don't always know who visits the sites (it just shows up as 1 viewer or 3 viewers on such and such date visited this album). Our biggest problem is between various members of my extended family, we have probably 6-9 paying phanfare accounts, each with their own albums, only certain ones of which we want to share with each other. This is very easy to do right now with the Family network - all of those albums can be linked and show up on one summary page. That will be gone once you take away this capability and I have no substitute in your new system that you are rolling out this week! Help, please!

Similarly, there's supposed to be an rss feed that updates for the same group as our friends and family, but I've updated albums and haven't seen any new notifications via the rss feed with respect to my recent activities. Really need some guidance on how to relink everything!