As I said, this shouldn’t surprise anyone considering that Shutterly bought Radar parent Tiny Pictures back in September of last year. Shutterfly is much, much larger than Radar ever was, so it makes sense to incorporate the best features of Radar into that product rather than keeping it alive as a standalone service.

“We plan to officially halt the service on Wednesday May 26th at noon Pacific Time, at which point you will no longer be able to access your account or your posts,” says the email.

Radar initially announced that the service would shut down on April 30, but apparently it got a stay of execution for a few more weeks. As they note, a tool has been created to port any pictures you have on Radar over to Shutterfly. Be sure to use it if you want to save your pictures before May 26.

Sharing videos on the Web is easy: Upload to YouTube or Facebook, send out a link. Sharing videos on mobile phones is still a pain. The iPhone tries to make it easier by letting you upload directly to YouTube, but what if you want to share a video privately? Sending videos between phones is cumbersome. A new service that just launched in beta called Thwapr seeks to solve this problem by letting you simply uploading videos from your phone to the Web and then texting or emailing a link to your friends.

Thwapr already works with 165 phones, from iPhones and Androids to Blackberries and Samsungs. After you sign up, you can email your photos or videos to Thwapr, and then share them from there to any mobile phone that supports links in text messages. As you add contacts to Thwapr, you can select them by name. The recipients get a text message with a link which opens up their mobile browser and takes them to Thwapr’s mobile website. They can see the shared photo or video and “Thwap” back a response, creating a conversation around the image. Each mobile video needs to be 20 MB or less for now.

Videos are delivered a variety of ways based on the type of phone the viewer is using. On the iPhone, they come as progressive downloads which open up in the Quicktime player. Other phones support streaming video. Older Blaackberries would get the video as a file download, and Thwapr can even deliver videos as rough animated gif images for phones which can’t handle anything else. Thwapr’s CTO Eric Hoffert worked on the original Quicktime team at Apple, as did COO Duncan Kennedy. Now they want to open up new video experiences on mobile phones.

Thwapr is meant for private sharing, but a public sharing option is in the works. And while Thwapr is launching via the mobile browser, the company is putting the finishing touches on an iPhone app, and has plans for Android, Blackberry, and other apps as well. the apps will remove the two-step process of having to send a video or photo via email and then open up the browser to manage to sharing options. The apps will also tie in directly to your phone’s address book, and take advantage of notifications.

Thwapr is really built for video. Hoffert considers it to be a type of image communications system which is an improvement on MMS. “With MMS,” he says, “the experience ends with the delivery of the picture. With Thwapr, we are trying to show that the experience begins with the delivery of the picture.” The picture or video is supposed to spark a conversation. Other startups, such as Tiny Pictures (which was acquired by Shutterfly), have followed this road before through dedicated apps. Perhaps Thwapr will have more luck taking an open Web approach.

The company was founded in 2007, and is funded with more than $2 million from angel investors. Thwapr plans to eventually charge for premium accounts (more storage, more Thwaps/month), geo-targeted mobile display or video ads, and possible sponsored Thwaps for movie trailers, music videos, and brand advertising.

They key to this app is that beyond your regular camera phone pictures, it gives you easy access to both your Facebook pictures (via Facebook Connect), and your Flickr pictures. Once you have those, it takes just seconds to tweak them and send them off to Shutterfly to be printed and delivered to you (or friends) in a special photostrip case. And before that arrives, they send you an email preview of what the photostrips will look like. These strips can also be shared on Facebook and Twitter immediately.

The best thing about these photostrips may be the price. For just $2.50, Shutterfly will print and send these things anywhere in the work. It’s “definitely in the micropurchase category,” the company notes. They are also using PayPal’s new in-app micropayments to allow for you to buy these photostrips (though regular credit card payments are welcome as well). The company is also giving away three free photostrips to the first 50,000 users who download the iPhone app.

The company says it’s working to bring this service to other devices to allow for the same type of easy photostrip making on the go. It also plans to add other effects to the application.

You can find Wink in the App Store here as a free download.

After raising a total of $11.2 million since its founding in 2005, Tiny Pictures sold to Shutterfly on Friday for $1.3 million in cash and another $1.3 million in restricted stock to employees, which has some performance triggers. If you back out the earnout, investors only got back about a tenth of what they put in.

Those investors include Mohr Davidow, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, and angel investors Reid Hoffman, and Joi Ito. The company’s last venture round was $7 million led by Draper Fisher in February, 2008. But Mohr Davidow, which held preferred shares, might have been the only investor to see any of those proceeds at all. Shutterfly disclosed the acquisition in an SEC filing, which only mentions Mohr Davidow as a recipient of some of the $1.3 million in cash.

It also mentions that Nancy J. Schoendorf, a managing partner at Mohr Davidow, sits on the boards of both companies. Although she did not vote on the acquisition, the connection raises the question of whether or not Mohr played a role in bring the deal to Shutterfly in the first place.

Tiny Pictures operates Radar, a mobile photo sharing app which never got a lot of traction beyond a core following. The service is actually pretty slick, centered around a photo commenting stream. You snap photos with your mobile phone which instantly is shared with your friends who also have the app. They can then comment on the photos.

It sounds simple enough, but the app never achieved a critical mass of users. The service is focused more on sharing life moments through photos with people you actually know than creating a public photo stream. So if you don’t know anyone who uses it, there is little reason to join yourself. The friends-and-family aspect must have appealed to Shutterfly, however, which is based on exactly that type of picture sharing. It already has a rich database of people who like to share photos with one another. Radar helps them extend that to mobile phones in a social and fun way.

Update: Tiny Pictures CEO John Poisson confirms that he will remain with the company at Shutterfly as VP, Tiny Pictures. He says that Mohr did not broker the deal in any way and that other preferred shareholders, including Draper, Hoffman, Ito, and himself, also saw some of the proceeds of the sale. As to what he’ll be doing at Shutterfly, he is kind of vague, but it has something to do with mobile social media, sharing photos, and self-expression.

Tiny Pictures operates the mobile photo-sharing service Radar, which lets members comment on each others camera-phone snapshots. Radar serves up 15 million mobile photos a month worldwide. Last November, the company introduced advertising in the form of public photo streams that movie studios and other companies try to get people to pay attention to. Blacked Eyed Peas singer will.i.am recently joined the company’s advisory board.

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 the audience has to help unravel the mystery). This sort of advertising will only work in so far as people don’t see it as advertising, which is why I like it.

Here is a page from Poisson’s Radar channel. Taking picture of food seems to be popular on the site:

And here is what Radar looks like on a regular Sony Ericson phone: