iTunes: Find, Learn About, and Share the Architecture around you!
WHY I’M INTERESTED
Anyone can document just about any property; it’s geo-spatial and collaboratively ‘crowd-sourced’ which means it could develop into the hyper- local building database. I love the idea, and think it has the potential to be revolutionary.
WHAT IT DOES
The mobile app is an extension of the web interface. You can view, but not add buildings, via the application. You can add content to buildings via the phone (such as a photo). As a test case, I added our office building restoration on 1/7/11, which took about 20 minutes to document and upload. The platform is multimedia heavy, encouraging archiving of photography, construction documents, publications, etc. Google search picked up keywords and the office building address within 7 days, so it could be a useful earned media tool. Like Wikipedia, anyone can add to it: Passerbys, former occupants, builders, owners, enthusiasts. Anyone.
It is also highly integrated with social media marketing; you can share the post via Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Instapaper, Pinboard, and Tumblr.
HOW WELL IT DOES IT
It is really, really short on content. As of writing this review, there were only three buildings in North Carolina (including mine) on OpenBuildings. The site was bug prone and crashed a few times, and gave error messages on others. My building ended up being posted twice (it was corrected a few weeks later). Photos showed online, but not on the iPhone app. There’s some debate that it’s not necessary to have this data in a mobile platform.
In fairness, OpenBuildings is a big ambitious project and is bound to improve over time. Collaboration is messy, and a relatively new phenomenon in information technology. There’s the innate challenges of crowd-sourcing, which may lead to credibility complaints. Eventually the site will make editorial decisions, so it’s not clear what it will be in a year’s time. It’s not yet clear how the entrepreneurs will regulate this. I suspect right now they’d file that under as a ‘good-problem-to-have’.
While the multimedia options are great, I do wish it allowed for audio anecdotes, which I expect it will in future versions. That way, a former occupant or builder could document interesting stories to give future stakeholders context.
Right now, the site appears to focus on elite starchitect buildings, though there are no restrictions on what is posted, so any builder could, in theory, post all his projects.
PROS: Revolutionary idea. Transformative potential. Media heavy. Not too difficult to post.
CONS: Still rough around the edges. More of a web application than phone.
CONCULSION: Right idea, but not totally clear on where the founders want to go with it, and the platform still needs work. Being such a large project with a large amount of data, the mobile app will probably remain an overly simplified version of the web interface. Still, if it became ubiquitous, it could be a useful tool for architects and builders to articulate and document design and construction concepts.
SCORE 70/100
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