Radar is a small but rapidly growing photo sharing site with a strong focus on mobile sharing. Radar has already developed applications for the Blackberry and T-Mobile Sidekick, as well as numerous other phones. Today, Radar also released its iPhone application (iTunes link), which is one of the better photo sharing and social networking apps we have seen for Apple’s phone so far.
Community and Mobile Sharing
Radar, at its core, is a photo sharing community that is not unlike Yahoo’s Flickr, though Radar puts a stronger focus on the community aspects of the service than on the pictures themselves, which makes sense, given that most of the content on the site was taken with camera phones.
Because of this, Radar’s web service and iPhone app emphasize communication between users. You can, of course, leave public comments on every picture, but you can also send private messages to other users.
Radar features a good set of privacy controls, which allow you to set your pictures to be private, or to make them visible to all of Radar’s users and the rest of the Internet. Radar also provides you with a widget that lets you display your images on your own website.
It Just Works
What makes Radar’s iPhone application special is that it provides you with an amazing amount of features (including some basic editing functions for your pictures), without overwhelming the interface. Every picture, for example, comes with statistics about how often it has been seen, liked, and commented on.
Using the application is a lot of fun because everything pretty much works the way you would expect it to. When you email pictures, for example, Radar’s app nicely integrates with your iPhone contacts. Double-click on a picture and you get the full-screen version.
As you would expect from a mobile photo sharing application, you can easily upload your pictures to Radar’s web service and see the latest updates from your friends.
One feature we do miss on Radar’s site, however, is RSS feeds. While Radar can send out a message to your Twitter and Facebook accounts, you can’t import a feed with your pictures to FriendFeed or other social media services. Radar, however, says that it is planning to integrate its service with more platforms in the near future.
Verdict
We got a chance to test Radar’s iPhone app over the last few weeks and really enjoyed the experience. The Radar community is still small, but also very lively and encouraging. Radar, of course, is entering a very crowded market, but they may just have found the right niche to thrive in.
