I’ve been test driving Architizer for a couple of months now, and I’m coming to the conclusion that I like it. With everyone on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn (among others) these days, I think the question in every reader’s mind will be, “How many of these social media profiles do I really need?” I initially felt the same way. I have a Facebook account that I check about once every six weeks, and a Twitter account that I tweet to about once every two weeks. However, I have found Architizer to be a rewarding experience in that they’ve already weeded out the white noise of subject matter and people that have no real bearing on my individual life. As the name suggests, it’s social media for the architecture industry, which makes it more relevant to my daily existence than any other social media interface out there.
I’m not wasting time on Architizer looking at who from sixth grade had a baby or what distant acquaintance is attending World Cup games in South Africa, because everything on this site is design-oriented. Architizer has everything separated out into categories such as Projects, People, Firms, Schools, Jobs, Competitions, Blog - and it’s ALL about architecture. You can also sign up for a newsletter to be sent to you via email. The site is a great source of inspiration for design.
My one complaint so far is that the Google map on the homepage takes forever to load, and quite honestly, it takes so long to load that I’ve never actually seen what happens when it’s done. My hunch is that the result is not worth the wait. Hopefully, Architizer will improve this feature before too long.
On a more positive note: Establishing a profile was fairly simple, and the interface is attractive and very easy to navigate. Adding a project (a competition entry which I posted on this blog last year) took a little more time, but was an intuitive process as well. In just a few minutes’ time, I was able to find a couple of people I knew from school, work, or through friends. There aren’t millions of people on Architizer (just under 12,000 at the time of this post), which hasn’t truly ”gone viral” yet, but I appreciate the level of connectivity that it affords to the architecture profession, and I look forward to Architizer’s future.