There are plenty of mobile apps that let you snap a picture and share it with your friends or the world—Zannel, Umundo, Mocospace, Pikki, MobyPicture, Yahoo Go—but one that does an especially good job at just sharing pictures among your friends is Radar. The service is run by Tiny Pictures, a San Francisco startup that has raised $4 million from Mohr Davidow Ventures. Whenever you snap a picture you want to share, you send it via e-mail to your Radar account. It appears immediately, and everyone you’ve invited as a friend can see the pictures and comment on them—either online or on their phones. The best way to use Radar is to download the application to your phone (it just added a custom iPhone app today). Whenever you log in, you see a stream of thumbnails of every picture you and your friends have posted. The commenting interface is pretty slick (you can plug it into AIM for instant notifcations of when a new comment has been posted to one of your pics). It the key to Radar because it turns each picture into a conversation starter.
This only works, of course if you A) have friends on Radar, and B) they post pictures on a regular basis. Radar, which launched more than a year ago in the summer of 2006, has only 600,000 users worldwide. But that number has been doubling every month for the past three months. So we might be at an inflection point here, especially as more capable phones come onto the market that can take advantage of its Web-like features. Radar serves 250,000 pictures and videos a day. Eighty percent of its traffic comes from mobile devices (it also has a regular Website), and 70 percent of its users are outside the U.S.
While most of the conversations and photos on Radar are private, you can choose to make them public. And today the company is also launching a public gallery, where advertisers can try to entice Radar members to subscribe to their photo streams. Right now, there are photo streams for the upcoming movie Hitman, pictures of frivolous but funny merchandise from iWoot, top video picks from Vimeo, and CEO John Poisson’s own Radar stream. There will soon be Radar channels from Hendrick’s Gin, iTunes, and the stealth Web video series Nowhere Men (which will focus on a group people “missing” since 2002 and the audience has to help unravel the mystery). This sort of advertising will only work in so far as people don’t see it as advertising, which is why I like it.
Here is a page from Poisson’s Radar channel. Taking picture of food seems to be popular on the site:
And here is what Radar looks like on a regular Sony Ericson phone:
Why does it sound like twitter pictures?
It seems a nice idea, and the fact that its doubling its userbase each month in the past 3 months show that users are enjoying it and its viral.
Right now I have no use for that since none of my friends are radar’s users but who knows what may happen in the future.
http://www.octabox.com
Yes, I think the users are really enjoying the connectivity feature of this mobile app. It looks good to get newer pictures everyday and post comments on it. However, I would just go and check if they are also offering some option to monetize your pictures that you post on their system.
Hmmm, everything that was posted about Radar is something I do with Flickr already.
“Whenever you snap a picture you want to share, you send it via e-mail to your Radar account. ”
Been doing that with Flickr.
” It appears immediately, and everyone you’ve invited as a friend can see the pictures and comment on them—either online or on their phones. ”
Been doing that with Flickr.
I don’t need another social photo network right now, nobody I know is using it.
Yep, I text my pictures to my flickr account and it does a superb job. But if flickr wants to crush these guys, they can easily come out with a UI app. directed at iphones and pdas and make the process more fun.
Another useless app. Are people running out
of things to do besides snapping another pic
and/or comment on pic?
Complete waste of life.
Can’t you do this with Facebook Mobile too? This way all your existing friends on Facebook can see your photos and comment on them. Much better way of reaching your existing social network.
I use radar, and actually, unlike Flikr and others, the whole start to finish of posting pictures and viewing via the site or iphone is quite an enjoyable experience. The website is beautifully done, minimalistic in its approach but yet all of its features are very well done. Also, the way the Radar team talks to its users via its blogs is amazing, they seem like normal guys, who just want to give you the best possible experience, instead of some large company/corporation that can give a hoot less about you, but more about their money. I strongly urge nay-sayers to try out radar with a few friends, especially if you are a guy that doesnt have a purse to carry around a regular digicam in, however carries around his cameraphone. Give your camera phone some action!
lol..’only 600,000 users’ - we’ve become so spoiled by the millions of the web
I just got it after reading this article this morning and totally love it, had a few friends sign up with me and now we can all see what, we’re doing when we do it! The app for my phone is really cool too I would advise checking it out, definitely.
iPhone users can upload their photos to their favorite social network (Facebook, Twitter, etc), photo sharing site (Picasa, FlickR) or even blog (Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger) using a dead simple service called iPhoneSlide –
http://www.iPhoneSlide.com
Flickr does not support 200 phones and as such posting pictures from your phone to flickr is messy at best. Radar make this hole experience sooooooo much better….just try it….
Cool! Except for the iPhone part.
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
600,000 users with alexa ranking 200,000+? even they just come to the website for signup, the traffic rank should be a lot higher. either alexa is totally useless or the radar team is bluffing (for what?)
i have been on radar for about 9 months now and it was great. all my friends are on it too so it is a lot of fun. the people bad mouthing Radar are just loners with no friends to have comment on their pictures. how can you talk trash if you have not even tried it yet? so just give it a chance its kick ass
@ I-don’t-need-an-ipodom:
No bluffing at all.
Alexa offers zero visibility into mobile traffic, and as Erick points out 80% of our logins are mobile. In fact, many of our users never touch the desktop web site; keep in mind the complete Radar experience is available on mobile, including signup.
(There’s also an argument to be made about Alexa not reasonably representing our audience, which tends to skew far away from the TechCrunch–and Alexa toolbar installing–crowd we’re all a part of, but that discussion’s been had already.)
Not sure about Radar, but the nice thing about Zannel is that they now have an embeddable widget for your myspace/blog.
webdude:
Radar has an embeddable widget. You can read about it here:
http://radar.net/blog/2007/09/.....radar.html
http://radar.net/blog/2007/10/.....in-th.html
We also have a fully integrated Facebook app:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/a.....amp;ref=pd
can’t be sure about rader but thats fine.
thanks for sharing information
bhaktapurgirl
mazzalo.blogspot.com
thats nice one i loved to read it .same has been down by myself
jasmine
tech-chek.blogspot.com