Radar Blog
You follow?May 13, 2009
John Poisson
Comments (6)
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.
May 14, 2009
Great round of updates! Good work guys.
May 14, 2009
woo hoo!!!!!!!!!!
May 14, 2009
Thanks JJ and Joshua. We hope you like and look forward to your feedback.
May 14, 2009
Awsome!!! You guys did a great job I'm very happy !!!! See----> :D
May 15, 2009
very nice. i love it . congrats. :)
May 17, 2009
I like it
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