Tech Bitch

Phanfare, probably the best image sharing site you’ve never heard of, is going through pretty significant transition. The business started in 2004, with the goal of enabling and empowering families to share and preserve photos and videos. The owners said they founded the company because they had nowhere they wanted to put their photos and videos.

They were willing to pay to have high-quality photo and video hosting, but over time it’s clear no-one else was. Phanfare offered premium photo and video hosting with no ads, phone support and an orientation that made each Phanfare customer a self-publisher with a direct URL, no branding and a simple email-based invitation system to see photos and videos. The system even uses synchronising desktop client software for Mac and PC.

Since 2004 the site grew to 11,000 customers. But the sad truth is that it’s going nowhere fast. The number of people willing to pay for anything online hosting of their photos and videos is too small. What’s more, its size limited its ability to do the integrations that it wanted wanted: wireless integrations, camera integrations, and digital frame integrations. At the same time, it looked at what it had created and realised it was not nearly collaborative enough. Phanfare was not exploiting the power of the Internet. Instead, it had built 11,000 little silos, each with its little audience.

Phanfare 2.0 was born! Pitched as a standard upgrade, but much more, Phanfare is now a social network rather than Web hosting. There are some important reasons why this makes sense. It should allow more collaboration between creators and viewers, increase the utility of Phanfare as it attracts more people, and is easier to use if you are connected with multiple people. Was it just me who found it cumbersome to remember the multiple URLs and passwords in Phanfare 1.0? Phanfare now comes with 1GB of free storage. Long term, it wants to monetise through some sort of advertising on the Phanfare 2.0 dashboard, but without running ads on personal albums as they ruin the experience and don’t work anyway. Give it up to the underdogs at www.phanfare.com.