Organizing and aggregating content from around the web using frames and bars is a trend we’ve seen from a lot of social sites in 2009. A similar curation resource now exists for designers, decorators, and architects: DesignBuggy.
Co-founder Ritesh Patel wrote in an email that his cohort and co-founder Chris Kincaid “was a print guy publishing a high end competitor to Architectural Digest. We hit upon the idea that perhaps curated search for one-of-a-kind materials from artisans in the design world would be a good idea.” Hence, their site was born.
The duo is also white-labeling the same concept under a different name: Sourcebox.
Why is the management of multi-source digital assets becoming such a hot topic in web trends?
“Curated search based on friends or people with like-minded views and thoughts will be big,” wrote Patel today in an email to us.
“We as users are becoming more community driven in all things we do online. Zagat’s had that original idea about how we trust restaurant recommendations from friends or people we know who are like-minded. The adage, ‘Birds of a feather flock together,’ applies universally. Add open technology, and now you have the capabilities of applying this to a whole set of categories and places.”
DesignBuggy’s experience begins when users install a simple bookmarking tool or a full toolbar in Internet Explorer, Safari, or Firefox. What follows can be as simple as occasional grabbing of ideas, sites, or items. It can also be as complex as a multi-user collaborative, long-term design project. The use cases are as deep and wide as the site’s well-thought-out toolkit, which includes sorting curated items by site as well as any number of categories and sharing items with groups and individual users.
Although the site’s database has yet to be built out by end users and there are more-than-occasional bugs, the organization and discovery possibilities are exciting and the interface is clean and functional.
DesignBuggy allows users to peruse the finds of “users who search most like you” in a section called “My Neighbors.” The site also makes inviting collaborators and finding current friends simple; searching by name is now available, and searching through email contacts is coming soon. Users can also subscribe to feeds from other users, websites, and categories.
We like the idea, and we love the execution. Hopefully, the co-founders will be able to build the user base to make this a really great resource for designers to collect and share data from the hundreds (thousands?) of sites they use most.
