What can you use the application for?
Opensourcefood aims to create a “A community of enthusiastic cooks” by providing platform for creating, browsing and sharing thoughts related to food through the age-old principle of social networking. Though the website does not have much to ‘serve’ on its own, it essentially enables ‘Food networking’ to sum up its objective. One can share the happenings of this website on Facebook. If the user already owns a Facebook account, direct sign-in is possible. One can rate the recipes and leave comments. The home page has visuals of various dishes that keep flashing on the right side of it. By entering keywords, one can have recipes that relate to it. The website limits the access to only those who are above thirteen years of age. The site is somewhat limited in its coverage as compared to other such sites in its class. It has excessive amounts of links of which affects its usage.
What is the history and popularity of the application?
Opensourcefood is the creation of a Tokyo based web producer, Yongfook. He does freelancing in the area of programming, designing and marketing and the application being talked about is run as a personal project.
What are the differences to other applications?
Every webpage has a different recipe along with the name of the member who submitted it on the very top. The close-ups of food are attractive enough to make one keep browsing through the website. This is one of the strengths of this application. The conversational tone it uses for communication is not a very standard one so the user gets it quickly. Also, the overall structure makes it differ from other similar applications.
How does the application look and feel to use?
The color usage is average. Combination of black, with yellow and white is alright, but grey colored text on a black background is sometimes not very clearly visible. The logo has a white and yellow colored picture that resembles an egg, thereby conveying that the website relates to eateries. Pictures of various dishes have been pasted on every webpage. These are pretty clear and beautiful and set one’s digestive juices on work. Hopping from one page to another is fast making navigation easy. However, the FAQ section is under construction, so no results are displayed when one clicks on that option. “preparing the content’ is what it says. To submit a query one can click on the hyper link ‘you can do so on my blog’. Also, organization of information is where it lacks, so it takes a while for the user to explore and understand all the utilities. The language used is not formal. At times, when one is turning the webpages, things seem unconnected. This calls for an appropriate placing of material. In other words, user-friendliness is something it needs to work on.
How does the registration process work?
This is optional and does not take much time. In addition to the usual information like username, email address and password, it asks about the country and gender. No credit card details are demanded at the time of registration. One can add a profile picture for the account. However, no confirmation email is sent to the email id given by the user.
What does it cost to use the application?
The website earns from the number of links (of the websites created by Yongfook himself) and ads from amazon.com. The site does not charge anything from the users for registration.
Who would you recommend the application to?
This application is of use to those who have a fetish for preparing; having and also making others eat and make good food. Sharing is the underlying principle on which the website rests. Queries regarding the ingredients of dishes or methods of making amazing food can be submitted. These are answered by the registered members in as informative manner as possible.
