Service

I like Radar.net. I really do. But I’m kinda torn over the whole service.

On one hand, Radar has more flexible group control and treats pictures like forums. That’s really cool, because it’s become clear that Flickr is not really optimized for this sort of behavior. Let’s say you post 40 photos from vacation, and you get a comment on several of them. You’ll have to visit a special page or two or use the RSS feed to find out because those photos may no longer be on your main page, and they don’t get marked up in any special way. But with Radar, those photos pop to the top, sort by most recently commented on. Instantly, you know when there’s a conversation happening. That’s what they’re optimizing for, and it’s perfect for mobile picture blogging. You can get a number of different alerts, from IM notifications (making it a bit like Twitter for MMS, as some people have been calling it) to email alerts that can be sent daily, weekly or even every-other-day.

On the other hand, Radar is private. Like, no-peeking private. No one can get in and play around with the site’s capabilities unless they create yet another online account. Certain modes of invitation involves some arcane-feeling “invite codes.” All the activity is hidden, and extra effort is needed to convince people to join up. And since it’s totally private, certain features like RSS go missing. If it’s a mobile picture-blogging experience they’re after, it’s not quite complete, since regular blogging has a very public face to it, and folks who do start private blogs leveraged the publicity of the public users to lure their friends into the habit. There’s really no lead to follow when first browsing the site, and it makes it a harder sell than it needs to be.

I think of Flickr as a community of photographers, not a discussion system. I’m happy when people comment on my photos, but I don’t expect it to be anything more than some feedback about the photo itself. It’s not a message to me, it’s a message for the next viewer. Even today, I will find comments or notes on old photos that I’ve never seen before — It’s just not visible enough or real-time enough. In the end, I use it as an online iPhoto.

I don’t want to take my lovely 10 MP DSLR photos and cram in a bunch of 1 or 2 MP flashless cameraphone shots. They’re just two different things to me, and I desperately want to keep them separate. Radar is almost exactly what I wanted for this, but the problem is, will anyone show up?

(Current score: 2 of 11 invites accepted)

Interesting facts from the article on WebWare about the debut of Slacker, a one-two punch to Apple’s digital music empire that consists of a music service and custom player hardware:

• About 70 percent of music enthusiasts don’t want to spend hours creating the perfect playlists;
• 51 percent of MP3 player users update their content only once a month or less;
• 46 percent don’t update more often because they don’t have time.

The really interesting twist in the Slacker service is that while the desktop app will perform jukebox duties as these players all do, the service model that integrates into it is radio-focused, meaning a free (ad-supported) version will exist, and the Wi-Fi enhanced player will periodically download and build mixes based on how you rate (and “favorite”) songs on the device, in the web player, and in the desktop app.

The name is clearly appropriate: for those out there who are more into radio and aren’t focused on building a large digital library, this may the device they were waiting for, and clearly targets music listeners that aren’t going to be interested in a library-only system like iTunes and the iPod. This could be big.