I read about radar.net today and got excited about it, it’s supposed to be Twitter for camera phone pics. Rob Merrill was tweeting just yesterday about being able to send pics to twitter and for a fleeting moment, it seemed like this may be it.
First though, Radar is kinda cool, but doesn’t offer anything flickr hasn’t already had for more than a year. Basically, you get a unique email address that you can send your photo to. Then it posts on the site and you can invite your friends to your page. I tested it out and this works just fine. I’ve been doing exactly that on flickr for quite a while.
Here’s where Radar falls short, isn’t like Twitter and I won’t be switching to it from flickr. The only way your friends can view your pics is if they manually goto the web site or use an app that has to be installed on their phone. For this to be like twitter, it would need to actually send the photo to your friends so they recieve updates when you post them. Making them goto the web site is SO web 1.0! There is no rss feed on the page so people can’t even get pics delivered to them that way! On top of that, there is no permanent home url i.e.: www.radar.net/phil801 instead, my pics page is a query: http://radar.net/pictures.html?id=77626&g=0&f=all&s=pt. I’m not sure who these guys are, but they’ve missed most of the basic principles of modern web services.
So, until Radar (or someone) actually differentiates itself from flickr and adds some actual social features, I’ll stick with flickr for now.
