Radar Blog

Announcing Flickr integration for Radar
March 9, 2009
John Poisson
Comments (0)

Back when I was still living in Japan, I gave a talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference on the work we were doing at Sony. At this conference a friend introduced me to Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake, who along with a very sharp team in Vancouver were launching a new photo sharing community called Flickr.

As I got to know the team and the community they were building it became clear that they had already created something big, and indeed Flickr grew to become the largest photo sharing service on the planet--a thriving community truly engaged by photography of all sorts.

I later moved to the Bay Area to found Tiny Pictures, where we ultimately brought Radar to market. Our mission was--and remains--to enable sharing of a new and emergent type of photo: an extension of the snapshot (and of course the Polaroid) that was instantly shared and immediately viewed. A visual status update that engendered conversation.

The cameraphone was the enabler, and as the technology here caught up with our expectations, we were able to deliver on our intent to create a first-rate experience for real-time browsing and commenting from any mobile device.

Cameraphones have had a massive impact on Flickr as well, especially the iPhone. And there's a growing part of the Flickr community that's engaged today in the same kind of real-time sharing that happens in Radar: "this is what I'm doing/seeing/feeling/experiencing".

Since the earliest conversations I had with Flickr, I'd hoped to one day combine forces around the role cameraphones could play. Today we've taken a pretty big step in that direction with the launch of deep Flickr integration for Radar.

Our goal here is simple: bring everything we've learned about real-time mobile browsing and conversation to the three billion photos on Flickr. More specifically, to help members of the Flickr community engage with each other--and with the members of our community--from their phones.

How does it work?

If you already have a Radar account, visit the desktop site and you'll see a link called Flickr Contacts on the left under My Radar. Follow this link and connect your Radar and Flickr accounts, then choose the Flickr contacts you want to see in Radar.

(If you're not already on Radar, just create an account or download the iPhone app to get started.)

Within minutes you'll start seeing Flickr photos in My Radar on all platforms: the mobile apps, the mobile site, and desktop. If there are comments on these photos, they'll appear as well, and if you leave a comment on a Flickr photo that comment immediately appears on Flickr as well.

If you view a Flickr photo full-screen in Radar, you'll see a link to that photo's Flickr page. If you click on the name of a Flickr commenter, you'll see their profile picture and a link to their photostream.

That's the gist: if you're already on Radar, you can now have a very similar experience around your Flickr contacts' photos; if you're ~not on Radar already, think of us as a real-time mobile client for Flickr, whether you make use of the rest of Radar or not.

Extras for iPhone users

All of this is designed to work well on all the platforms we support, but given the huge success of our iPhone app and the flexibility that platform affords, we managed to add some additional functionality.

You can set up Flickr integration and choose who to follow from within the iPhone app, and you can upload pictures directly to Flickr as well. (We'll be doing geotagging in the near future; stay tuned.)

What's next?

There's been much talk in recent months about real-time sharing, both in the context of Twitter's increasing success and Facebook's recent shift in this direction. We architected Radar in a way that allows us to do this kind of integration with other services as well, and we look to you to inform those next steps. Tell us what you want and we'll see what's possible.

Thank you, Team Flickr

We worked quite closely with the Flickr team to get this right, and to craft an experience that was of value both to our community and theirs. Aaron, John, Sara and Josh: thank you for all the support and guidance in pulling this together.