Photo and video sharing service Phanfare has relaunched with enhanced sharing capabilities and a free 1GB version meant to entice users who are not ready to pay $55 per year for unlimited storage. The company found that the first version of its service didn’t make it easy enough for its 11,000 paying members to share their hosted media with each other. Sharing usually had to be done by manually emailing password-protected links to family and friends. These emails would get lost, and with them, the URLs and passwords contained within. Users would also grow tired of composing bulk emails, leading to a siloed data effect where content sat unviewed. The new version of Phanfare addresses this issue by integrating social networking functionality that enables users to create connections with one another and specify which content they want to make available to their Phanfare contacts. The photo sharing model is very much like it is on Facebook, although with more granular control on who sees which particular content. You can designate other Phanfare members as part of your family or friends, or you can link up to them through groups (say, for your neighborhood or office). Then, you can decide which of your uploaded content you want to share with friends, family, and/or group members. Once shared with the appropriate people, new content is broadcasted to them through an activity feed on the site’s “dashboard” (shown to the left). This “my messages” area will not only show you thumbnails of your contacts’ most recent contributions; it will also display notifications of when people leave comments on your photos, as well as when they confirm you as part of their networks. This activity will also be gathered by Phanfare for a digest email that goes out daily. Phanfare aims to build a large user base, so it has made it easy for you to introduce your friends to the service. Its invitation mechanism allows you to send out email invites that help new users set up a free account, join your network, and view your content. New users are now given a free 1GB, as opposed to the old model where all users had to pay $55 per year for unlimited storage. While users can still choose the paid option to get more space, this free base membership option should facilitate the collaboration aspect of Phanfare 2.0 by boosting the network effect. → Read More

Photo and video storage and sharing service Phanfare has offered a downloadable desktop client for Windows and Mac since early 2005. It’s an impressive tool – but the company found that people wanted access online. Today Phanfare launched a simple version of its desktop client on the web, called My.Phanfare. It’s an interesting case study in support of what are being called Rich Internet Applications – a cross between web and desktop apps with some important processing being done on the client side. Phanfare offers unlimited storage of both archival and web quality photos and videos up to 10 minutes long (and an impressive 1.5 GB in size) in monthly, yearly and lifetime plans costing $7, $55 and $300 respectively. CEO Andrew Erlichson’s last company, Flashbase, was acquired by DoubleClick in 2000. They face competition from a number of other companies, including the well funded Sharpcast and Fabrik, a company with a Maxtor/Seagate hardware partnership. The Phanfare desktop client focuses on offering a smooth workflow and at that it is successful. From an intuitive display of all your photos at once for rapid-fire captioning to doing the bulk of the upload in the background of the app – there are things that Phanfare on the desktop can do that web services generally don’t and in some cases can’t. It’s a powerful, responsive system but that alone wasn’t enough. The company has always offered simple, ad-free web pages to display publicly posted photos, video and slideshows set to music. They provide secure storage online and can quickly repopulate a local cache of media. The company found though that people want to be able to upload, edit and delete photos from the road, from multiple locations and from the browser. Customers are now so accustomed to web access, the company says, that they frequently get confused trying to login to the desktop client through the web browser. Though web based photo sharing is all the rage these days, Phanfare points out that most of the company’s customers show their media to less than 15 people and almost no one stops using their desktop photo organizing tools. Without a desktop client, customers can’t work with photos offline, media can’t be automatically imported from hardware and the workflow is simply not as fast. But without web back up then files are as impermanent as any individual piece of hardware. It’s a good combination, heavy → Read More