Beyond Photography: Iconography?

Forget Flickr. Never mind Twitter. These popular photo-sharing and microblogging services are all very well, but they’re elitist niches, and both will tremble before the power of cellphone camera photo sharing.

Or at least, it’s hard not to walk away with that impression after meeting John Poisson, CEO of a small company called, appropriately, Tiny Pictures, whom I had lunch with yesterday. The company’s hot product is Radar, is a service that shares cellphone camera photos between friends. Radar, self-consciously aimed at the mainstream, has 650,000 users already, and is in a period of exponential growth; Mohr Davidow Ventures handed Poisson $4 million to help it along.

Download the free software Radar to your phone, and it’s a snap to instantly share cell phone shots with a preselected group of friends. Some cell phone pictures you want your mother to see, like that newborn baby or that sunrise; others you only want friends to see, like that night on the town.

Radar is not the only cellphone picture-sharing service, of course; others like Umondo and Zannel are also invading this relative virgin territory. But it is the first to catch fire with the public at large, gaining the kind of growth that can mean only one thing: The same network effect we saw with eBay, AIM, Facebook, to name but a few.

The more people there are on Radar, the more fun it is to post on Radar. The more friends you send pictures to (which is how you sign them up for Radar, offering the reward of the picture), the more you have your own little network of snap-happy friends. And that’s where it starts to get interesting. That’s where you start to see the future.

As Poisson demonstrated with his own Radar stream — which anyone can sign up for — people are starting to use cell phone shots as a kind of shorthand for their lives. Call it a post-literate diary, shared by a group, with unlimited pages. Threads of visual narrative develop.

It’s not photography, it’s iconography. If the ancient Egyptians had cell phones, this is how they would communicate.

Much of that narrative, right now, seems to revolve around food. For some strange reason, people love to show off what and where they’re eating or drinking. (Poisson took pictures of our plates throughout lunch.) Even stranger, other people love to leave comments on those pictures. The PR person accompanying us at the meal said Radar was extremely encouraging for her diet, knowing that all her friends would see everything she ate.

It brought back memories of editing a story about a paid service based in Canada called MyFoodPhone. That company lets you take cell phone snaps and email your food pics to nutritionists, who advise you on what to cut out and what to add. Radar, then, is a free alternative.

But of course, it’s more than that. Barring any false steps of a Beacon-like nature (Radar has streams from advertisers, of course, full of their own branded iconography; but for now, all those streams are opt-in), Radar is a safe haven for cell phone snaps to evolve into a fully-fledged medium.

Think about it: increasing millions of us constantly carry around always-on, megapixel-plus cameras. That can hardly fail to change the nature, purpose and focus of photography, as surely as Polaroid and the Kodak Brownie did. Food is just Radar’s first frontier. Who knows what’s next?

There’s a dark side to this camera-obsessed future, just as there’s a dark side to Bluetooth headsets and texting. An increasingly visual society may well become increasingly shallow and narcissistic. (As I said to Poisson: “I fear you will succeed all too well.”) If you think snap-happy tourists are annoying now, just wait. And it doesn’t take too lurid an imagination to see this kind of service in the hands of a would-be stalker or predator. (Poisson has already had to ban some users for being too explicit in their visual diaries.)

Of course, you have to weigh that against the benefits. It’s hard to argue against a service that allows old friends and family seperated by thousands of miles to see the world through the same eyes. A page filled with your loved ones’ current visual experiences? Who wouldn’t want to see that as often as possible?