It was a beautiful Portland summer morning. Quiet. Cool. Before the heat of the day really started cranking up the thermometer.
Between juggling a fussy baby and and even fussier Labrador, I finally got to my local Starbucks for my morning coffee. In the calm of that moment, staring over my steaming cup, I pulled out my iPhone and fired up the new Facebook app. Nothing unusual there: part of my morning routine these days is to see what’s been happening in my friend’s and family’s lives.
Only this time, I checked-in first and let them all know where I was.
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Back in January, I wrote that 2010 would be “the year the mobile web really begins to matter.”
I thought it might be big. But boy was I wrong. It’s huge. The landscape of the web is tilting towards the small screen faster than I ever expected.
Allow me a brief anecdote: Last night at dinner, some friends were raving about their new phones. These are good friends, but hardly tech savvy, and successful in careers that don’t require them to be at a computer all day.
The ease with which they were now “persistently online” with their Droid X’s – checking email, catching up on Facebook and downloading apps – had caught them by surprise. They were hooked. I doubt very much they’ll spend much time in front of a traditional PC in the future.
Sure. This is one couple, in one town. Hardly a large sample, you say. But if you look at the big picture, I think this is an experience that is being replicated day-in, day-out, across America.
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You go to a real estate website.
You click “Find an agent.”
On the “Find an agent” page, you login using your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google or Foursquare account.
You are then presented with a list of agents in the company with whom you share a connection, an interest, a shared experience, employer, hometown or other commonality.
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Does this sound at all familiar?
The group running AA.com consists of at least 200 people spread out amongst many different groups, including, for example, QA, product planning, business analysis, code development, site operations, project planning, and user experience. We have a lot of people touching the site, and a lot more with their own vested interests in how the site presents its content and functionality. Fortunately, much of the public-facing functionality is funneled through UX, so any new features you see on the site should have been vetted through and designed by us before going public.
However, there are large exceptions. For example, our Interactive Marketing group designs and implements fare sales and specials (and doesn’t go through us to do it), and the Publishing group pushes content without much interaction with us… Oh, and don’t forget the AAdvantage team (which for some reason, runs its own little corner of the site) or the international sites (which have a lot of autonomy in how their domains are run)… Anyway, I guess what I’m saying is that AA.com is a huge corporate undertaking with a lot of tentacles that reach into a lot of interests.
Could this be your company?
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Google launched a revamp of their Google Images search this week. The service has been a remarkable catalog of the web’s visual information since 2001 and now indexes over 10 billion images.
But as of now, it’s even cooler.
In a nutshell, Google tweaked the display of its image search results, creating a denser tiled layout, instant scrolling of the results pages (very slick) and removed the annoying framed presentation of the source image with a light-box-style hover image.
So whether you’re searching for a city, neighborhood or even a product, searching Google Images gives you a broad, vibrant and instant peek at how the world sees what you’re looking for.
It’s pretty amazing. Read »
Inman’s Real Estate Connect SF 2010 has come and gone.
It was perhaps the best Inman show ever, thanks to new Inman CEO Tim Smith and his team. The event has never been produced more thoughtfully.
This was my 13th Connect SF event. This year, more than ever, I enjoyed seeing so many people who have, like me, hung around this industry through boom, bust, success, failure and years of work in a business environment that might charitably be called unique.
All because real estate just really matters.
It was a great week.
Below I’ve shared just a few of the things I took away from the event.
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Frontdoor.com just announced a pretty slick new feature to its website. On each of its roughly 4 million real estate listings, visitors now have the ability to choose from a dozen or so home styles and assign it to – or tag – the home.
Further, the tagging feature — where homes get pegged as Cape-Cods, Traditionals or Moderns after they have received a certain number of “votes” from the crowd — will then allow Frontdoor to offer users the ability to search by home style.
This feature will be added later this year – presumably after the database has had a chance to populate.
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The following companies have been added to the 1000watt Index this month.
All submissions are reviewed by the principals at 1000watt Consulting before publication. Publication in the 1000watt Index does not constitute an official recommendation or endorsement, nor is any financial compensation accepted for inclusion.
If you’d like to have your company or product added, please complete the submission form found on 1000wattindex.com
Realtor.com released a major site update in beta yesterday. I’m at 37,000 feet as I write this and don’t have much time, but wanted to offer a few quick observations:
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