Radar.net, the mobile photo sharing application, has just introduced a video version. As with the main service -- and unlike its rivals -- it's designed for sharing only among a select group of friends. When you sign up, you get a unique Radar.net email address to send your images to - you can then invite friends to view your pictures and comment on them. You can use Radar on the web, or view the mobile version on your cellphone.

John Poisson, Founder and CEO of Tiny Pictures, says, "Video clips in Radar work just like pictures: shoot a video with your phone and post it to your Radar, where your invited friends can see it and leave comments. Video clips become part of an ongoing visual conversation with your friends."

(BTW, this is the kind of guy you want to buy stock in -- John Poisson was former head of mobile media research and design groups at Sony in Tokyo, before founding Tiny Pictures in S.F.)

Back to our story...

At a time when everyone else is building wide open, publicly viewable photo sharing applications, the Radar strategy is an interesting one. New users can refer their friends, but it won't add up to the kind of viral marketing you get with Flickr or YouTube. The company is betting that in the long run more people might want to use it for the privacy issues alone. I asked John why they built the service along these lines:

First, there are literally hundreds of services out there that allow you
to share publicly -- some great and some horrible -- but we felt there was
still a parallel need for a way to interact with your friends privately,
especially when it comes to something as personal as pictures and videos
from your cameraphone. In Radar, there's no creep looking at your
pictures. (Unless, of course, he's a friend of yours.)

Radar users can also transfer higher-quality cameraphone videos to their PC and post them to Radar via e-mail. Radar supports cameraphone video clips up to 3MB in size. And if you're sending a video to your girlfriends of the highlights of last night's date, just for example, you can set detailed privacy settings .

Radar is free and new users can register by visiting Radar.net on their PC or mobile internet browser.