Radar Blog

We have some unfortunate news to share today. In order to refocus the company's efforts--on Radar and on several new initiatives--we've had to say goodbye to several members of our team today, including a few people many of you have come to know personally in the Radar community. I know you'll join me in wishing them well.

These changes are never easy, but we remain excited about the future we're crafting here. We're hard at work adding new functionality to Radar and focusing on some big Tiny parternships. We'll continue to keep you all updated.

Thank you.

Summer in the Bay Area will be here shortly and with it will come BBQ season, so we've asked ourselves: "What better occasion then a summer BBQ to meet-up with local Radar fans?"

So we're pulling out the grill and the charcoal, we're stocking up on burgers and hotdogs, and gearing up for 'darBQ 09.' 

On July 18th, join local Radar addicts and the Radar team for good food, fun games, and a few cold ones around the grill. We'll provide the grub, the beverages and everything else, you bring your friends and your cameraphone.

Meet us at Speedway Meadow in Golden Gate Park on July 18th from 12 PM to 5 PM.

Please be sure to RSVP on Facebook or Upcoming to help us plan accordingly.

mia, skyler, morgan & ian

Who: You and your friends, the Radar team and Ray
When:  Saturday, July 18th from 12 PM to 5 PM
Where: Speedway Meadow,  Golden Gate Park - San Francisco.
Directions: Enter Golden Gate Park at 25th and Fulton. Continue on 25th and take a soft right onto Transverse Drive. Speedway meadow will be on your right hand side.  Be on the lookout for Ray.

We're seeing some occasional issues with the site right now, and we're having a look. Thanks for hanging in there.

We receive a ton of requests for the Radar t-shirts, hoodies and other gear you've seen around, so we've decided to open up the Radar Shop.

Have a look around, and show you're down with the brown.

For many of you, Radar has always been a way to privately share with close friends; this is where we started when we first built the service. In parallel, we're seeing more and more interest from people looking to share publicly, be a part of the growing Radar community, and even build a large audience for the things they're sharing.

In order to allow both to thrive, we've changed the way accounts and relationships work in Radar.

Public and Protected accounts

For those of you who want to share privately, we're introducing Protected accounts. You control who can see your posts, and they don't appear in any of the community areas of the service. You can still mark individual posts Public if you want them to be shared on Facebook and Twitter. If you're already a Radar user and have not changed your posting preferences to Public, you now have a Protected account.

We're also introducing Public accounts for people who want to share most of their posts publicly, both in the Radar community and on Facebook and Twitter. If you have a public account you can still share individual posts with select friends. If you previously switched your posting preferences to Public, you now have a Public account.

You can review and change your account type at any time.

'Following' replaces 'Friending'

We've moved to a 'follow' model in Radar. Here's how it works:

If I go to your profile or one of your posts, I'll see a Follow button. If you have a Public account, I can click the Follow button to instantly add you to My Radar. You'll get an alert that I'm following you, along with a button to follow me if you choose.

If your account is Protected, the Follow requires your approval: you can either Accept or Ignore my request. And again, you'll have the opportunity to Follow me back, but only if you want to.

This means we're preserving that explicit 'friend request' idea so important for private sharing, but making it far easier for people to get started on Radar, to discover new people across the community, and to do things with Radar that we never expected.

You'll notice a host of interface improvements to Radar to support these new features, most notably on the desktop site. We cleaned up Profiles and the navigation bar on the left of the page, and improved the visibility of Alerts, too.

Featured People and Posts

To highlight some of the people that make the Radar community what it is, we updated Explore and renamed it Featured.

Have a look around: you'll find photographers and accidental artists; some highly personal reportage; and a few of the Radar mavens who constantly reinvent our service. You'll also find various members of the Radar team.

What else?

While we were at it we worked in some features that many of you (and all of us) have been clamoring for:

Mention alerts: When someone mentions you in a comment or post title, you'll now get an Alert within Radar, not just an email or text message.
Favorites: Mark anyone you follow as a Favorite, and use the Favorites filter to view only posts from these people. You can also mark Flickr contacts and Gallery channels as Favorites if you like. If you're following a lot of people, you've been looking for this feature.
Block: From time to time on any community service you come across someone who you wish you hadn't. We have a team here to deal with such things, but now you have the ability to immediately block someone yourself. (This replaces the Report This User feature; we immediately look into anyone who has been blocked by multiple people.)

The hairy details

The entirety of the Radar service is a complex beast comprising many platforms. Some of the platforms we support--the mobile applications in particular--require third party involvement before what we build gets in your hands. Today we released all of this on the desktop and mobile sites, and the other pieces will fall into place in the coming days and weeks:

iPhone: An updated Radar app for iPhone is being delivered to Apple for approval. In roughly a week, it will be available in the app store, and will give you access to all these features directly from the app. Hang tight, iPhone users.
BlackBerry: In the next few days we will release an update to the Radar app for BlackBerry. In the mean time your current app should work fine, but you should visit the desktop or mobile site to access these new features. The new BlackBerry app will include Profiles, Featured Users, Alerts and everything else you've been waiting for.
Other mobile apps:The Radar app for Java, Windows Mobile and Sidekick will be updated over the next several weeks, depending on where you discovered and downloaded the application. As with BlackBerry, this update will bring these applications up to speed with all the new features.

We appreciate your patience as we synchronize all these moving parts. If you have trouble with your mobile application during this period, let us know and remember you can always fall back on the mobile site until your app is updated.

Enjoy all this, and definitely keep the feedback coming.

UPDATE: we're ~just about there everyone. thanks for being patient.

We're launching some major changes to Radar, and we need to take the service offline for a little while to complete the rollout.

You should expect that Radar will be unavailable until 9pm San Francisco time today, May 13. The upgrade might take less time to complete, or could run a bit longer (it's a big one!) but we'll keep you updated here.

(As always, if you send us any pictures while the service is offline, they will post as soon as Radar is back.)

Hang tight -- we think you'll be pleased with the results.

Radar is once again up for an award. This time it's the Mobile User Experience Awards, and you guys can weigh in on the winners.

Follow this banner to rate Radar. We're counting on those 5 stars!

We'd like to introduce you to Shawn (a.k.a. uncultured on Radar): a former Notre Dame grad student who launched The Uncultured Project to help fight poverty in Bangladesh. We heard about his mission a few weeks ago when he started using Radar (among other services) to share his experience with the world.

As said on his blog:

"This is not a charity, organization, or anything formal. It's my journey to try and make the world a better place - one meaningful difference at a time. It's about inspiring others to believe that we can be the generation that ends extreme poverty. Hopefully, this project can also show the big multinational organizations that there is a better way to engage people on the issue of global poverty."

To help fund his journey, a growing number of people have given up expensive or frivolous habits, and donated the savings to The Uncultured Project. In fact, our very own flawedartist, Community Manager for Radar, today pledged to give up a seriously addictive vice. Have a look:

After witnessing Shawn's adventures first hand on Radar and because we think this is a great initiative, we've decided to donate $500 to the cause. We know it isn't much money, but we also know that he will make good use of it. 

The strong community support around Shawn's project and his creative use of social media services like ours, is proof that together we can make a difference.

Follow The Uncultured Project on Radar, Twitter and YouTube.