Radar Blog
What we've been working on this summerSeptember 17, 2008
John Poisson
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As promised on Sunday, today we roll out some important changes to Radar in this, the first of several such releases over the next few months.
Supporting a lot of the changes you'll see today is our next-generation Radar friending architecture. It's faster, highly scalable, and far more capable of connecting you to the people you want to share with, whether they're existing Radar users or not.
The inner workings of this architectural change don't matter as much as the results, and what's in place today is designed to support our--and your--needs as we scale from millions to tens of millions of users.
Here are some highlights:
Alerts
We've added a new alert system that displays important news about your friends' activity on Radar, in-line with posts on both mobile and desktop. There are three types of alerts:
Friend requests allow you to more effectively send and manage friend requests without relying exclusively on email. If a Radar user sends you an invitation to an address associated with your account, you'll also see the request as an alert. You can accept or ignore the request in place, too, and even add that user to a friend list if you choose.
New friend alerts give you real-time visibility into who your Radar friends are friending, allowing you to very easily add friends in common.
Shared post alerts help you keep track of posts that Radar users have sent to your attention, whether you are Radar friends or not, using the Send by Email feature. (Look for more details on this feature below.) Also, you'll have easy access to these posts for future reference.
All of these alerts display on My Radar as they happen, and travel down the page as new posts come in. You can go back to them at any time by clicking on the new Alerts links on the left side of the page.
Post detail page
We've redesigned the post detail page to make it easier to control who sees your posts. The new "Sharing with" control allows you to quickly (and with auto-complete!) enter Radar names and friend lists to specify who can or cannot see a particular post. It also makes it easier to share a post publicly, and to allow anyone to grab a link or embed code for public posts.
We also improved the visibility and usability of the other features on this page--most notably Send to Email--and made some room for a few very important sharing features coming at the beginning of October.
Posting defaults
Thanks to some feedback from the more public-focused Radar users out there, we've added a Posting Defaults option to the Privacy section in Settings. Use this to specify your default audience for all new posts: make all your posts public by default if you like, or share only with certain individuals or friend lists and expand the audience for certain posts later. Set the default options you like, then you can change the privacy settings for any individual post at any time.
New email invites
We've redesigned our email invitations to make them more personal and, well, inviting, and to help your friends better understand why you sent them. They contain thumbnails of your last eight posts, and link to a page that helps your friends understand the service before signing up. This same design also applies to posts you send to friends by email.
Send by email
As with email invitations, we've redesigned the Send by Email feature to make the result a lot more engaging. We've also made it possible for users to share anyone's public posts by email. Why the fuss? We know that not everyone you know is a Radar user, and this feature makes it easier for you to quickly share something you posted with anyone, whether they're on Radar or not. It's also a great way to wake up a Radar friend who hasn't been back in a while. Give it a try.
Apart from these evident features, we've made a number of performance improvements across the service, both on mobile and desktop. We've also cleaned up our URLs for all pages to help you understand where you are and what you're looking at.
Many of these features come from direct feedback from our users, and we absolutely welcome your thoughts on what we're releasing today. Stay tuned for a whole lot more in the coming weeks, and as always, enjoy.
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