Radar.net adds Flickr to mobile repertoire

Social tool Radar.net has added support for Flickr on all its mobile applications, including the iPhone. Radar users who are also Flickr users can plug-in their account credentials and get the latest photos from their contacts filtered into Radar's activity feed. Likewise, if one of your Radar.net friends has a Flickr account their Flickr photos will begin to show up too.

At first glance, the iPhone version of Radar's app for photo viewing is not quite as good Flickr's mobile page, but it packs a punch. You can take a photo with your phone and send it to either Radar or to Flickr, and if you double tap on the image it gets rid of the rest of the UI and lets you zoom and rotate it within a virtual workspace. It's very fluid, although the scaling does not re-render the image, meaning large, detailed images suffer pixelization. Luckily, you can solve this by visiting the Flickr-hosted image using the built-in Web browser.

Where the app is really a step up from Flickr's own mobile app is in helping filter other user's comments. You can filter the list of content to see both the latest comments on everyone's photos, and your own. Flickr has made considerable headway in helping users sort out these two areas of activity, but on the Radar app it feels like the conversation is more of the focus. As an added bonus, whatever comments you leave in the application will show up on the Flickr photo's page.

Upcoming features for future versions of the app will include support for geotagging, and playback of videos hosted by Flickr. Flickr only recently made mobile-friendly streams of video available to third-party developers, which means you'll start seeing them pop up in more applications over the coming weeks.

Radar is free in the iTunes App Store. It's also available on BlackBerry and Sidekick phones, though only iPhone users get the capability to post photos and pick which of their Flickr contacts they want to appear in the Radar stream.