App of the Day: OpenSpot helps you find an open parking spot

Google’s new OpenSpot application for Android just made life a whole lot easier by helping you find parking spots. For those of you who drive in a city, remember how hard it is to find a parking space? I can’t drive yet, but trust me, the number of times my dad has had to circle around the neighborhood looking for a free parking space is too many to count (try every Saturday in Flushing, Queens).

The concept is easy enough to understand. When you need to park, just open up OpenSpot and it’ll tell you open spots within a 0.9 mile radius. Open spots are marked with pins, and each pin is color-coded to tell you how long the spot has been open. Red means freshly-marked (less than five minutes), orange means more than five minutes ago, and yellow spots mean ten minutes or more. After twenty minutes though, the pin disappears from the page (with the assumption that the spot is not open anymore).

Well, here’s where it gets a bit iffy for me. OpenSpot is based on the concept that you’ll mark any open spots you find with the belief that there’s someone out there who would do the same for you next time. Google also claims to have their own method of dealing with “griefers,” people who mark spots when there are none. Even so, my worry is that there are only so many Android users out there, and a whole lot more needy cars.

Still, it’s a good idea right? If you have an Android and a car, please download the app here and tell me how it goes.