Author: Franklin

Real Estate Agent Search – HomeThinking.com

I am selling my home. Long story short – my wife gave birth to twins just over 2 years ago and as a result we are quickly running out of space.

So we are selling our home. So I have been delving into Real Estate Web 2.0 lately.

So in the weeks to come I will mention some of the tools that I am actually using to search realtors and listings.

HomeThinking.com is a Real Estate Agent Search engine. It is not a brand new site but new to me. From the about page:

“Homethinking is an online service that helps home owners choose the most remarkable neighborhood real estate agents to sell their house. We measure performance by monitoring real estate transactions to know which houses each real estate agent has sold, for how much and how long on average it took them to do so. There are also user reviews by home owners who have sold their house with the particular agent that helps determine the rank of them.”

The homepage is clean and allows you to quickly browse by state and city. It then displays all the agents in that city/area. I then could easily browse the agents in my city alphabetically by last name. I quickly found my agent.

The display shows my agents average sale price per home , the high sale price, and the low sale price.

Two tables are displayed additionally on the agent page. On the left it shows me all houses sold by the agent in the last couple of years.

On the right I can also see all houses being listed by the agent including asking price.

During the agent search it boasts the following:

“Tracking 1,520,018 Real Estate Agent Profiles 5,538,707 Total Transactions 1684 This Month”

That is a lot of agents. I checked out several of agent search sites but this one was the best for my area. Check it out. Link

FriendFeed Noise Solutions

I read a post today titled “Proposal to Clean Up the FriendFeed Clutter” by Hutch Carpenter. It clearly outlines some of the noise problems with FriendFeed.

I have seen the need for change to the FriendFeed stream for weeks now. The problem in a nutshell is that the same link appears over and over as it is submitted to multiple services by multiple users. One destination but many entries in my stream.

The stream is noisy. Some may like it noisy but I would like it to be quieter.

I first discussed the multiple link problem in conjunction with what I called ‘The FriendFeed Disjointed Comments Problem.” The same links clog the stream over and over. My point was that many different places for comments existed. Every entry that existed had the potential for comments and conversation. But comments are a different issue. For more on the comments problem see Comments Floating in the Blogosphere.

Mr. Carpenter gives 2 possibilities for how the data could be presented to eliminate noise in the stream.

  1. Person-centric: if a user has the same feed more than once, the same-link feeds are aggregated together under a common link for the user
  2. Link-centric: all same-link feeds for all friends appear under a common link

I am in favor of the Link-centric approach. This has already been coined the “techmeme way.” Some including Corvida are against it.

Bret Taylor of FriendFeed has already commented on Mr. Carpenter’s post saying:

“Great ideas… We have been thinking through these issues as well, and it is great to see such detail and mockups.”

I agree Mr. Carpenter’s article certainly gives food for thought.

My point is let the user decide. The data being presented can be displayed in several different ways. How about giving the user several different ways to customize their stream. Person-centric, Link-centric, the current approach, and many other ways could be developed.

It would be great for FriendFeed to implement several and let the user decide how they want to view their stream.

Update Already

In this strange landscape that we call Web 2.0 a web app is born with few features but lots of promise. In the exciting but cliché “BETA” phase many changes take place. Rich features are developed to make the app a must use and must see. This is the most exciting time in the life of a web application where many changes and development take place.

Then comes the dreaded phase of a web application in which all resources are devoted to keeping the application running. This becomes a state where little or no development/enhancement takes place.

I understand full well the difficulty and pressures of keeping a web application running. Meanwhile investors and other onlookers ask and question profitability. Other pundits wonder about the applications strategy and potential for actually making money.

All of that makes sense to me in the big picture. However as a passionate end user invested in the application this “stay up phase” is very frustrating.

So the app has made it to the stay up phase, has a loyal following/user base of thousands or millions and loads of potential. We can call it the “rock solid app.”

Then bring on the competitors. Small start ups with little funding but lots of ideas start sprouting. The user base of our rock solid steady app is intrigued.

Why? Simply because of the phase change. The new start ups are shiny and new and in that cool “BETA” stage or even in “private BETA.” Development is occurring on a daily basis as the start ups develop and fine tune their feature sets.

The user base of the rock solid app user base may decline slightly but stays about the same. For it is rock solid and keeps running.

Time passes… more time passes… and more time passes… the rock solid app does nothing new to speak of but its up. No new features but hey it is running.

UPDATE Already!!! Meanwhile the blogosphere dreams up all sorts of enhancements for the rock solid app. The rock solid app can also pull ideas from the smaller start up competitors.

The rock solid app has the resources, plenty of ideas, and a large mostly loyal user base. But no new enhancements.

UPDATE Already!!! But the rock solid app is up and running.

This is the point in the post when I wanted to name the app. But the more I thought about it I know it applies to many. This is unfortunately very common. Update Already. Please?

Comments Floating in the Blogosphere

Comments here,
Comments there,
Comments posted everywhere.

Comments here,
Comments there,
Comments floating in the blogosphere.

The blogosphere is a buzz. The conversation is about comments. I wrote the other day about “the FriendFeed disjointed comments problem.” My post was pointing out how FriendFeed could help move the conversation back to the original blog.

Conversation is taking place outside of the originating blog and the problem is far bigger than just FriendFeed. The buzz began over the weekend when Louis Gray’s post “Should Fractured Feed Reader Comments Raise Blog Owners’ Ire?” hit Techmeme.

I watched as Louis Gray’s post hit and the problem was clearly demonstrated. Conversation took place on the blog post, on plaxo, and on friendfeed. Certainly that was not all of the stir. I am sure other conversation took place on many other sites as people on del.icio.us commented as they bookmarked it, commented on the digg submission, etc.

The FriendFeed conversation was certainly spirited. The whole issue revolved around Shyftr and whether they should allow commenting with full text RSS. Some compared it to simple content scraping. It led one user to state, “they (Shyftr) can expect to get hit with a DMCA take-down notice” if his content was used.

My take on the whole issue. Shyftr is great to allow comments. Almost every Google Reader user would love the ability to comment in the app. However let’s create a system to allow posting back to the original post.

I posted the following on the FriendFeed conversation:

I wonder if CommentsPortability.org or OpenComments.Org are available? A system must be devised to send the comments back to the blogs. An open standard will come out of this. I can see Disqus being one of the early players. As for the offenders they are too numerous to name. Disqus, Digg, Del.icio.us, Plaxo, FriendFeed, Shyftr, Mixx, etc. Anywhere you post a link and comment not on the original blog would be included. I think this applies to linkers as much as the sites that pull the full text RSS.

The issue is protecting content creators. I have seen numerous posts lately about the changing landscape of the blogosphere and the lack of original content. Content creators simply feel threatened by someone else getting the page views and never even knowing about it.

So I was kidding about CommentsPortability and OpenComments but we simply need a system to let the Shyftrs, the FriendFeeds, or wherever else the conversation is taking place send comments back to the original post.

As my comment stated I do think Disqus could be a major early player in this.

Dave Winer says that RSS has elements in place that can be used. Can’t we allow just get along?

My Problems with Toluu

As a whole I like Toluu. For more on Toluu check out the KnightKnetwork’s interview with Caleb Elston and Louis Gray’s first post about Toluu. Toluu the RSS feed sharing discovery application is a cool concept and does function pretty well. The integration to add a feed to your feed reader is great. But here are few problems I found and features I would like to see.

Speed, Speed, Speed – When you click on the matches tab it takes what seems like forever to change and display the matches. That is a crucial point in the application where it actually shows you intelligent matches of RSS feeds you would like. Displaying this main feature of the application needs to be much faster. I have had it take several minutes. Users can not deal with minutes it must display in seconds. From the Contacts view I click on Matches for one of my contacts and again it sluggish.

Redundancy – When the Matches tab does finally display it shows several users who “match” you and a percentage. You then see a list of “Feeds you might like” from each user. What is interesting is that one of the same feeds is displayed for every user. In my case the feeds “Micro Persuasion” and “GigaOm” are under 4 out of 5 users. This is redundancy that should somehow be eliminated. I have also seen redundancy in the same user where it shows the same feed twice.

Feed Elimination – If a feed exists that I am NOT interested in I would like the ability to exclude from future recommendation. If “Micro Persuasion” is not what I want to read it could be put on an exclusion list.

Toluu is beta and I am sure the application will grow and change. One thing I have been looking for is user enhancements in the form of greasemonkey scripts. This has already added a lot of functionality to FriendFeed.

I will add and subtract from list as the application changes.

By the way I still have invites if anyone is interested. Leave your email in a comment if you want one.