Archive for September 2009
Phanfare introduces RAW support, Drop Box and more
What did we do over our summer vacation you ask? Make Phanfare better of course. We are excited to announce that today we introduced a bunch of improvements to Phanfare spanning all aspects of our system. Many of these were top items on the Spring survey.
Welcome RAW files
Over 70% of our customers own a digital SLR and many report to us that they shoot RAW at least part of the time. Phanfare now accepts RAW files from Phanfare Pro customers. You can upload RAW files from Adobe Lightroom, Apple Aperture, the web, the PC client and the Mac client.
- RAW files are limited to 100 MB each. Tell us if you need more.
- Each RAW file must be associated with a JPEG image in your account. The filename is the key. If you upload an image to an album that has the same prefix as an existing image but a file extension outside of the ones we support for viewing, then it is assumed to be a RAW file. An example works best: If there is an image called IMG3433.JPG in an album and you upload IMG3433.CR2, then we assume it’s a RAW file. Any file that is not one of the core file types we support for regular upload (JPEG, TIFF, PSD and all the video types), is considered a RAW file.
- Our RAW support creates a sidecar for the existing image. You can download RAW files right from your web albums. Of course, you can also suppress that option and control whether new albums get created with RAW download turned on or off.
- The Lightroom and Aperture plugins were updated to support RAW and you can export JPEGS and RAW files simultaneously to Phanfare. Thank you David Holmes for updating the Aperture plugin.
- RAW storage is not included in the Phanfare Pro fee. You must purchase 10GB RAW storage blocks for $24.99/year each.
- Phanfare keeps RAW files the same way Phanfare keeps your JPEG images. Each RAW file is uploaded to Amazon S3, where it is replicated in multiple data centers, assuring that it will always be available.
- To get started with RAW, purchase a RAW storage block by logging in at http://www.phanfare.com. RAW storage blocks are offered on the bottom left of your logged-in home page.
Your Own Online Photo and Video Drop Box, Available 24×7
The Phanfare drop box enables you to collect full resolution photos and videos from anyone, over the web, into your Phanfare account. The drop box is useful when your friends have taken photos or videos that you want to include in your Phanfare album. Normally, moving large files over the internet is difficult, but with the drop box, your friends can drop stuff off as easily as you can upload yourself. Here are the details:
- Every Phanfare site has a dropbox at yourname.phanfare.com/dropbox
- There is an icon that looks like a little inbox, next to the search magnifying glass on the top right of your web albums that links to the drop box.
- The drop box is disabled by default. You enable it in site options from web, Mac or PC client.
- Every Phanfare Subsite also has an optional drop box. For example, if you create a subsite yourname.phanfare.com/soccer then the drop box will be at yourname.phanfare.com/soccer/dropbox.
- When someone drops off photos and videos, you will get email notifying you.
- You have unlimited storage for drop offs.
- When a person drops off photos and videos, Phanfare creates a new unpublished album for the photos and videos.
All Phanfare customers, Pro and Premium, have a drop box, but only Phanfare Pro customers have Subsites and hence drop boxes for Subsites.
iPhone 3GS Video
Phanfare now supports video shot with the iPhone 3GS. We know it’s been few months since that phone was released. Thanks for bearing with us. You can upload the video directly from the iPhone using Phanfare Photon or you can move the video to your computer and upload it with one of our other tools.
We are working on re-converting videos files uploaded to us in the past few months to fix all known iPhone 3 GS videos.
The Phanfare Referral Program makes Friends with the Web
We announced the Phanfare 50/50 Referral program over the summer. To review, when you recruit a new Phanfare Pro member, you receive $10 in Phanfare credit and they receive $10 off the first year. For new Pro members, they get $20 off, and you get $20 in credit. To get the credit, the new member had to put in your email address when signing up or paying.
The Referral program still works with email addresses, but now each of our customers has a unique random referral code, which you can see here, that can be used in links to Phanfare while still giving the new member a discount and you a credit. Here are the details:
- Your referral code can be found in settings,referral program on the web (link only works for logged in Phanfare customers).
- There are two types of links that work, links to our home page and links to the signup page.
- The link is formed by adding r=YOURCODE. For example, to drive someone to our home page, the link would be http://www.phanfare.com/?r=YOURCODE.
- You can put your link right on your Phanfare web albums if you like.
- Your email address is still a valid referral code, but you can’t use it in links to Phanfare.
We had quite a few requests to enable linking to Phanfare and referral credit. Both old and new ways have their virtues. It’s convenient that a friend signing up for Phanfare can put in your email, which they might know off the top of their head, and get a discount, while providing you credit. But you don’t want to put a link out there on twitter or on a public web page with your email in it.
Similarly, the random referral code is nice for links, but your friends surely are not going to know it by heart. Hence, we offer both.
Odds and Ends
We fixed some bugs in this release, including some bugs in the Mac Client.
We improved the contact manager to support contact groups. You can create a contact group and email everyone in the group at once.
Whenever you share an album within Phanfare, we now automatically add the recipients’ email addresses to your contacts.
We tightened up the look of the table of contents page for web albums . We made improvements to the Phanfare classic style, now called the Hardcover Book layout, and we the new layout, now called “Large Thumbs.” Most of our older customers don’t even realize that we offer 2 choices of layout for the Table of Contents. You can control which one is used in Website Options.
TechCrunch fooled by Facebook into posting a false story about Facebook
TechCrunch was fooled today into posting a false story that facebook now offers faxing of photos. It’s a funny story and well executed by facebook. But it also made me wonder if this would not have been successful against the NY Times or another traditional media outlet with a solid reputation.
After years of experience in the craft of journalism and the budget to create operating manuals, the NY Times learned how to fact check, calls sources and generally try to make sure that they were not getting “punked.” I fully realize that the traditional media is far from perfect. Whenever I have been close enough to a story to really know what is going on, I see how much of an approximation any reporting is. But combared to new media, The NY Times is generally much more careful.
In my mind, TechCrunch is a well run, mainstream blog. I don’t think many blogs do a better job of being journalists than they do. Nevertheless, they were fooled in a way that I think mainstream media would not have been.
I love new media. I love that information moves at the speed of light and there are many more voices. I love that the barriers to entry to becoming a journalist are practically zero and that all citizens are essentially now journalists through twitter.
But at the same time, it is clear that new media does not have the budget or inclination to do the type of carefully fact-checked investigative journalism that has traditionally made up the the 4th estate.
Maybe it does not matter; maybe first-party fact checking is replaced by the immediacy of online media. That the story only really lived for a few hours and hit much earlier than it would if it had been carefully confirmed may be good enough. Perhaps the Internet is just one big voting machine that collectively checks, edits, and rewrites what any one person says, much like wikipedia.
But if that is the case, then we as citizens must ready everything with just a little more skepticism. After all, maybe we are the first one to read it, and hence expected to correct it.
Is Twitter replacing RSS?
This idea came to me by way of TechCrunch, which covered the movement of Feedburner founder Dick Costolo from Google to Twitter. In the article, Mike Arrington references Steve Gillmor’s piece from May where he proclaims RSS dead.
RSS never really caught on with mainstream consumers as a way to follow news. But you can’t argue the success of RSS as a technology. Every blog and every major news website publishes an RSS stream. Those RSS streams, which are really nothing more than URLs where you can pull, via HTTP, an XML document with a list of recent headlines and often the full body of articles, make up the basis of news aggregation services like Google Reader, Google News and MyYahoo.
Why didn’t RSS take off with the mainstream? I believe there are two fundamental reaons. First, discovering new content is hard with RSS and easy with Twitter. Second, because Twitter limits itself to 140 characters, the stream does not carry the full text of articles. Viewers are driven back to the publishers where they see advertisments and fully engage with the publisher’s brand. Hence, publishers love twitter. It brings them traffic to their website. Publishers have a love hate relationship with RSS.
Discovering New Content
Twitter is all about discovering new content. By default, you can see which Twitter users any given person is following and follow the same users. There is no central place to this with RSS.
Google has attempted to address this deficiency by adding features in Google Reader to share what you are reading and find out what popular people read via RSS. But these features are buried and only appear in Google Reader. They are not built into the RSS system.
Twitter has a short memorable namepace making offline communication of feeds possible. ABC news can put right on the TV that you follow them at twitter.com/abc. Twitter serves both the publisher of a feed and the consumer of the feed. RSS never had this. The closest thing we had was Feedburner. Consumers have no idea what feedburner is. It means nothing to them. It was glue technology between Google Reader and a Blog.
Getting Publishers on Your Side
Web publishers live and die by getting traffic to their website where it can be fully monetized via advertising. Twitter drives people back to the publisher. RSS takes the content and makes it available outside the source site. That is not publisher friendly.
I use Google Reader to follow blogs. It works amazingly well. Like most folks, I prefer blogs that publish the full article, not just the headline, so that I can stay within Google Reader rather than jumping to the source site to read the article.
By using Google Reader, I completely avoid the advertisements and I miss out on the comments (there are some ads in the RSS stream, but only a small % of what i would see at the publisher’s site). Publishers have a love hate relationship with RSS for this reason. it helps get them readers, but if everyone used RSS to consume the content, the advertising model falls apart.
Because twitter limits messages to 140 characters, putting the full text of articles into the stream is impossible. Instead, nearly everyone posts via a URL shortening service, driving the reader back to the source site. This is much better for publishers who then get to show ads. It’s arguably better for readers too, since they can engage in the comments.
Where do We Go From Here?
Looking at Twitter as a replacement for RSS, the average person, who mostly consumes content, would rarely post anything to twitter. So forget the long tail of people tweeting what they had for lunch today.
I don’t believe RSS will go away anytime soon. If nothing else, Google relies on it today to index blogs posts for search. But RSS will certainly be marginalized by Twitter. Twitter already enjoys much wider name recognition than RSS amongst consumers. I challenge to you find a person on the street who knows what RSS is. RSS will be relegated to being a glue technology on the web.
My belief is that twitter will evolve much like blogging. While there will be a long tail of personal streams that are read by nearly nobody, the vast majority of the traffic, as measured by publisher to subscriber messages, will be dominated by more mainstream publishers and bloggers who will be sending links to less personal and more news-like content. In the world of media, the vast majority of time spent by consumers is spent on media created by a relatively small number of talented content producers. While the web certainly lowers the cost of entry to becoming a publisher, most people still lack the talent to entertain a large audience.
Further, if Twitter is to replace RSS, then the importance of the twitter clients can’t be overstated. Hence, apps like Tweetdeck and Seesmic will shape our experience and be very valuable, just like Google Reader was. Expect Google to create or buy a killer AJAX twitter client to integrate into their suite of applications.
What’s interesting to me is that Twitter will likely win over RSS precisely because it brought together several important features that you need to cobble together using RSS: discovery, managing multiple subscriptions, and reading the streams. The accident of restricting messages to 140 characters so that viewers needed to go to the source publisher sealed the deal by making Twitter much more publisher friendly than RSS. Publishers were more interested in promoting their Twitter feed than their RSS feed.
I wonder what other services that are successful with the geek set but largely ignored by the mainstream can be popularized by fixing the deficiencies and integrating the various parts under one roof.
An Engineer 