My Chosen Technology: Keep Recipes

It has taken numerous hours exploring the two websites, Keep Recipes and Taste.com to be able to make a decision as to which is the most suitable. It was a close call but... 

Keep Recipes Is the technology I have chosen for my social resource.

Here's why!

Taste.com would be great as a personal online library as it was fantastic for searching for new recipe ideas and storing them. However, it was far too complex and inconvenient for sharing these with others. I became very frustrated when navigating around this site, and was convinced that I was missing something! I could not find a way to share my recipes with friends directly, only through the community portal. Unlike Keep Recipes, I also found that with Taste.com I was unable to search and invite friends to view my recipes. 

Keep Recipes functions as both a recipes library and a community cooking portal and therefore had some great community sharing features which makes this the most appropriate social technology to support my social event.

Although some of it's feature might not be perfect yet, I like that it has integrated with other widely used social medias such as Facebook and Twitter. This makes it easy to share recipes with those that may not be as technologically advanced and want to persist in using the technology that is familiar to them. Keep Recipes does not exclude anyone, no matter whether they are using PC or Mac. If people are not connected to Facebook or Twitter or do not want to sign up with a free account they can simply be emailed the recipe.

Keep Recipes allows an easy way for my friends to follow my online library.  I can send them a personal invite to view my entire collection or send an individual recipe. Recipes and ideas could be easily shared between through a choice of other media technologies such as Facebook and Twitter and email. Keep recipes recently added Iphone App makes recipes conveniently and easily accessible. I can add and share from just about  anywhere.

I trialled this site extensively by creating 'dummy accounts' and asking my partner to use the site. This allowed me to test the sites sharing capabilities before creating my PDF instructions for my peers to follow. In doing so, was able iron out any glitches and most importantly, found the most user friendly methods for communicating with my peers.

I also came to realise that after speaking with my tutor about my PDF instructions I needed to be a bit clearer on what it was I wanted my peers to contribute to my social event and why I wanted them to contribute to my site. Rather than just using it for their own purpose, create a narrative to motivate my peers to contribute. An event such as a morning tea would create purpose in sharing recipes between my peers.