I had the chance recently to catch up with John Poisson, the head of Tiny Pictures, the company behind the Radar mobile service. I first met John a couple of years ago, and I came away from that meeting impressed both with him and Radar. John really gets mobile, and gets how people use it and how it can enrich their lives (plus, like me, he has cool glasses ). Radar was always cool, but in 2006, it was way too early. Things have changed, though, and something like Radar is a much easier concept to explain to people, given the booming growth of Facebook and Flickr and so many other social-networking services.

So, to recap, Radar is an “experience-sharing” service built around cameraphones. While it lets users share their photos, it’s not really a photography service, it just uses photos — along with comments and messages and short posts — as a proxy for sharing experiences. Poisson readily concedes that Flickr or Facebook are great for photo-sharing, but Radar is built for interaction, especially when users are mobile. It’s always had some platform-specific mobile apps, but it’s put a lot of effort into beefing up its mobile web site, and it shows.

I’m glad to see that Radar has had some success in attracting users, particularly among US college kids, who’ve got the inclination (as well as perhaps the patience and time) to invest in tools like this. But just as we’re seeing things like Twitter and Facebook status updates trickle out into the wider population, Radar should continue to grow as well — particularly as John and his team work to integrate it with other social-networking tools. I think, at some point, many people infatuated with Twitter and the like, will be ready for something that allows more flexbility and options than 140 characters of text. Sometimes that’s enough, sometimes it isn’t. Sure, there are things like TwitPic that can be linked in to Twitter, but a service like Radar can offer a much more polished and integrated experience.

In 2006, Radar was definitely early. In 2008, the market has caught up, but Radar remains at the leading edge. It’s well worth checking out, even if only so you can see where this experience-sharing/lifestreaming/microblogging trend is heading.