phanfare sharing hiking photos and videos

[jeffmac]

For those of you who really enjoyed sharing your hiking
photos and videos on phanfare.com before they
forced people to register to view your hikes.
I got an email today saying that they are going back to being open.



Dear Phanfare Customer,

Our changes to Phanfare, released in January, and collectively known as Phanfare 2.0, were aimed at making Phanfare more collaborative and more widely adopted.

The move to social networking based permissions was meant to increase engagement and simplify tracking and viewing multiple Phanfare users' albums.

Since January, Phanfare has grown from 11,000 paying customers to a community of over 125,000 registered users, with about the same number of paying users (some have quit, some have joined).

But the message we are hearing from all of you is loud and clear: an overwhelming majority want the ability to regularly share your photos and videos with those not registered with Phanfare; and this makes sense, there are a lot more people not registered for Phanfare than registered.

I am happy to announce that we will be bringing back the ability to share your albums with people not registered for Phanfare.

 

[kevinmac]

Here is the rest of the email:

"The social networking features of Phanfare 2.0 will be optional.

I hope that with these changes, we can win back your trust and business. We never intended to hold your data hostage at Phanfare, but for some of our customers, 2.0 did just that.

You are scheduled to be upgraded within the coming weeks, and will receive email after the upgrade is complete. Upgrades are scheduled to begin on June 9th and will be completed by August 1st.

Here are a list of changes that we think will be most important to you:

+ Your old phanfare URL (username.phanfare.com) will continue to work, but it will now redirect to a longer URL.

+ Your old CNAMEs that allowed you to show your photos and videos at yourname.phanfare.com will continue to work, but they will also redirect to longer URLs.

+ There is now a navigational header on top of your albums that allows for easy navigation and some phanfare branding. This header is not currently removable. You can view a sample open public album on Phanfare 2.0 at http://albums.phanfare.com/open

+ Managing and editing your photos and videos from the web, without downloading our software, works better than ever before.

+ There are new Mac and PC clients for those who want to use them. The Mac client now runs disconnected, without a network (as the PC client has for some time).

+ Old external links used to embed photos and videos in blogs and websites will not work after you are upgraded. You can create new external links for each photo and video you want to embed. We are sorry about this.

+ Site and album passwords are no longer supported. To securely share, you can send out invitations via our email tools similar to 1.0 (due in our next release) or link to the person as family, friend or group member within Phanfare (registration required).


There are other changes too, but these are the changes that we think will most affect you.

Please let us know if Phanfare does not suit your needs after these changes.

Best regards,

Andrew Erlichson"

 

[poison ivy]

I am glad for their existing customers that they finally saw the light. But for me it's too little to late -- mainly due to customer service reasons.

I don't feel comfortable giving money to a company that a) treated customers with concerns about the change so poorly (particularly because in the end we were right that it was not a good idea) and b) made a wholesale change to the way they did business without caring about their paying and (until then) loyal customers.

Erlichson dismissed my concerns, telling me more than once that phanfare did not want my business if I wasn't excited about the changes. He told me to "go to smugmug"... I did, and that's where all of my hiking pictures are going to stay.

Just my two cents,
- Ivy