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edw519 has been using Ramamia from the start and has always been an amazing contributor of suggestions for the app. For that, Jason and I thank you.

> - About half my family members (45 people) have never contributed to the site. I don't even know if they've ever even visited. I suppose this is normal, but I don't know.

That's a big family. Hmm. In the past we had "yo your family didn't share anything this week, share some stuff" emails every week. We analyzed it and it generated a lot of pageviews. I thought it was complete rubbish, since it was annoying to get one of these a week; Jason thought it was great for getting traffic. We're still not sure how to deal with the activity problem, but we're looking into it.

> - The biggest complaint is ease of use. Many members have left the comment "Enter a comment..." because they clicked the "Add Comment" button before entering their text. Then they're embarrassed and don't try again.

Yeah, we've seen a lot of this. http://screenshots.markbao.com/b51c1333e1cbf8c859a1dab023b75... We're probably going to create a throbbing thing that says "You're supposed to enter a comment here ->" or something.

> - When a link is emailed to someone, that link takes them to the post referenced, not the the main page heading. All they can see is that post. It's not obviously apparent that by clicking on our family's name that you can go "Home". You should either put a giant "Home" button at the top, or better yet, have all links just go to the Home page. Chances are the referenced link is right at the top anyway.

Huh, really? That's interesting. Perhaps we'll underline the family name and see how well that works. The only ways this won't work is in special cases like weekly emails or something.

> - Although it's possible to attach text to a picture, it's not apparent how to attach text to an album, or if you even can.

Like a description thing? We wanted to keep it simple, but this is a pretty valid oversight. Adding.

> - People have figured out how to post pictures or text, but not both in the same posting.

Hmm. Didn't know this was something people wanted. Will look into it. We need to do some user surveys soon.

> - The comments are not threaded (like here at hn) so it's tough to ask and answer questions and have conversations.

Good suggestion, but I'm not sure if the wide amount of Ramamia users will have a significant gain versus confusion with threaded comments. A lot of them are rather used to email, so linear conversations seem to be where it's at.

> - Lots of people have forgotten how to get to the site. You might want to consider a giant sign, "In order to come back here to Ramamia, just click any link in any email from us."

Good idea. You know, we were thinking of moving to a password-only kind of thing, where people would specify a password instead of our nice but overall somewhat confusing login link. Have the login links worked out for your family?

> - Some family members want to download and share pictures. I have explained that that's not what this site is for. Then they say, "Well then, we should use <xyz> instead." I don't know how to respond to them.

I'll put downloading an archive of photos in the icebox!

> Some of this may sound like nit-picking, but you really need to make it idiot proof

That's one of the big problems I had while working on Ramamia... trying to make everything as easy as possible. It's incredibly hard and I agree—people are running into problems I would never anticipate. It's WTF-inducing.

Great to hear your family is liking Ramamia overall, though. All of this is going directly into Pivotal Tracker. Thank you edw, for being a great supporter and contributor.

For the comment issue, why not just visibly disable the add comment button until the text field is changed?

or change the text to 'Submit Comment'

I'm not a Ramamia user, so please excuse it if my comments seem ignorant; they are. I'm just thinking about what my family would want/need. If it's slick enough, we might become users one day. As far as I'm concerned, you'll have to beat the MobileMe/iPhoto combination, which is still very much one-way, but extremely easy to use.

Some family members want to download and share pictures. I have explained that that's not what this site is for.

This is a must. Save the original files when they're uploaded, even if you then show downscaled versions to users on the web interface: have a prominent "download printable version" link/button. Also: have a button for downloading a whole album as a zip file or whatever. You're charging people, so suck up the extra traffic and storage.

Killer: have an "order a [framed/unframed] print of this" button for those who don't have a photo printer and glossy paper. Interface with a third-party printing service for this, get commission for it.

Speaking of iPhoto: importing albums straight from iPhoto would be fantastic. This is technically possible from a Java Applet or maybe via Flash, but prepare to sink quite a bit of effort into it if you decide to try this. Let me know (email in profile) if you need any pointers.

Ed, once again many thanks. This is a gold mine. It's hard to seem thankful enough via a text box, but I hope it shows :-).

I think our biggest problem is that we're giving it mediocre effort. We're on that cusp of doing something great, but we keep treating it like this side project. That means the really small details like the ones you mentioned get overlooked or the smart viral loops get left out. I've always wanted to take Ramamia to a higher level, but I think I get worried about the what-ifs/am i passionate enough/ can it make money/etc aspect.

You're the one that keeps saying it's a side project. Asshole.

;)

haha, I know im kind of being a pussy and doing it to cover my ass. You also have like 4 bajillion other projects! It's more of a do I want to do this full time for passion reasons? I'm pretty certain if I went balls to the wall on the marketing+product feedback side, it could be a success.

Mark and I are comfortable enough with HN to have founder discussions out in the open.