Pete's Eats

John Poisson has been working on his new venture, Radar, very very quietly for some time now, and now it’s open to all-comers. I’ve been using it for a little while (in beta) and it’s a very cool app so far.

So, sure you can send pictures from your phone to Flickr via Shozu or one of the other methods, but Radar allows you to send from within the Java app on your phone as well as view your contact’s pictures, comment on them and so on. The app is very slick and works like a dream on my Nokia. It’s also a great way to check out where your friends might be in the city, almost in real time.

The app is very focussed on the ‘friends’ side of things – you have to know a person’s id to be able to see their pictures and this keeps the whole thing within a circle of friends quite nicely – this isn’t your dad’s social network.

I’ve found Radar to be the best thing on my phone to pass the time waiting at bus stops and airports. This isn’t meant (I don’t think) to be about the photography side of things by itself, but more about sharing the images with your mates. For this reason, most of the images in my circle have been fairly low quality but perfect for small screen, mobile viewing. I haven’t tried it yet, but I think you can send images from your computer (and so, other cameras/devices) via email if you wanted a higher quality gallery, but this kind of misses the point in my opinion.

The most important thing for me though, is that Radar is just good fun. Go check it out, and shout if you know me and want to hook up on there…

NOTE: Thanks to Nuno for pointing out a glaring mistake on my part. I won’t mention what that was… :!

UPDATE: I just got an email from Andy Tiller who’s the CTO at Shozu. His idea of setting up your Radar email address as a ‘other destination’ in Shozu makes very good sense:

I saw your blog posting about Radar

and it prompted me to have a go. It’s definitely an

interesting service, and nicely implemented.

It’s a bit like Rabble, which is a US mobile community for

sharing photos and other content phone to phone. Have you

come across these guys?

I think Radar is quite complementary to ShoZu – in fact, if

you set up your secret Radar email address as a ShoZu “other

destination”, it’s a lot easier to post photos captured with

the native camera app to Radar. It’s also cheaper if you’re

also sending photos to Flickr, as you only need to upload

the photo over the air once.

Very cool, cheers Andy.

Technorati Tags: radar