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 → Read More
Umundo is a new service that allows users to share photos and video captured on mobile phones without the need to set up an account. By entering a phone number or email, anyone can subscribe to a feed in a number of online readers or in iTunes. Code is also available to display video on MySpace pages. Oliver over at MobileCrunch wrote a positive review of Umundo last night and compares it to another system called Abazab, but I have some concerns about Umundo myself. The system is very easy to use and seems unique in its support for uploading both photos and video by phone. Unfortunately the ease of use comes at a serious cost in functionality. Since there are no accounts required there’s no option to remove single images or videos from your feed. The entire feed can be deleted at once, but in the fast paced world of embarrassing social blunders and inappropriate teenage behavior that MySpace covers it seems important to have the option of deleting a single photo. If there was a simple account page available this and other issues could be easily solved. Widespread adoption is also likely to be mitigated by the fact that you can’t view photos in iTunes or MySpace. According to the FAQ only video is supported in those systems. There are certainly ways to offer code to display images in a feed directly on an HTML page. Given how widespread iTunes use is it would make sense to me to offer images as album art. The system is interesting because it offers both photo and video support, but the photo support seems like it was an afterthought. That’s too bad, as I can imagine photos could be integrated better with MySpace and this could get a lot of use. Feed subscriptions are displayed as “Clip(s) from 2134453567 headlines” in your feed reader and items are title links. A title field for the feed itself would be a logical thing to include. I’m not sure how compelling most MyYahoo users, for example, would find a box on their page with a string of numbers above a list of one line text links. Hexlet LLC, the company behind Umundo also owns RSSBazaar, a feed publishing service used to deliver content like Umundo images and video. I imagine this means that the company is capable of making some changes to the feed → Read More
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