DeviceGuru

A new Google Labs webservice aims to help drivers find and share parking spaces. Using this new cooperative service, which unsurprisingly requires the use of Android-based smartphones, “we’ll all save time, save gas, and reduce pollution,” says Google.

The concept is simple: Open Spot lets people who are leaving parking spots share their spots with people who are searching for parking.

Android app screenshots showing space marking and space retrieval
(click each image to enlarge)

According to Google, Open Spot displays parking spots within roughly 0.9 mile (1.5 km) of your current location, and the display refreshes as you continue moving.

Spots shown as “available” get removed from the map 20 minutes after being intiially “marked” by the sharing driver. Colored tags indicate the elapsed time since they were marked, as follows:

• Red pins — freshly-marked
• Orange pins — marked 5+ minutes ago
• Yellow pins — marked 10+ minutes ago

“We know that 20 minutes is a long time for a parking spot to stay open, but we think that more information about available parking is better than less,” quips Google. “We’re working on clearer ways to show you what spots are the most recent.”

There are two catches:

• To use Open Spot, you need a smartphone running Android 2.0 or higher
• The service currently is only available in the U.S., Canada, and the Netherlands

And then there’s the Karma points, which you accumulate whenever you mark an available parking spot. It would be nice if drivers with high karma could be given a jump on newly available spots. However, cheating the system by falsely marking parking spots as available would be all too easy — a trend that would render the whole concept counter productive.

For further details, visit the Google Lab Open Spot app website.