estatecreate blog

How much time do you waste clicking on a link to a property only to see that the photos show somewhere completely unsuitable. How would you like to drag a stream of photos of images of properties in the price range and area where you live to quickly zoom in on something you like?

Sorry to get you all excited, but this site does not exist. But it could. I have just been playing with Cooliris. As they put it themselves, “Cooliris transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the web”. I was not disappointed. Somone will adapt this for browsing properties - it’s going to be great.

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I have just tried out Google’s new social bar (you can read their blog post about it here). It allows you to easily integrate Google Friend Connect into your website, so that users can login using either their Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account, comment and have conversations about content on your site.

You can try it out on this site: http://www.ossamples.com/socialmussie/

It looks very easy to implement, so expect to see it on estatecreate.com soon.

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After 7 days, 55 followers, following 120 people, 50 updates and more time than I will ever admit to, I just could not take it any longer, so I deleted my account. Twitter.com/HPY is no more.

Last week Twitter dominated my life. If I wasn’t checking Lance Armstrong’s latest musings from the tour down under (twitter.com/lancearmstrong), or stalking Dragons (which turned out to be fake), I would be constantly interrupting my thought process by checking out the latest conversation being held by some people I am vaguely connected to.

I started the week using www.twitter.com, by Wednesday I had downloaded Power Twitter, a firefox plugin, by Friday I had downloaded Tweetdeck, allowing me to have 3 columns of different groups of mindless consciousness streaming down my page, with a desk top reminder flashing at me just in case I missed a tweet.

Finally the weekend arrived. Respite from this constant pull was in sight. But no. I still had a nagging desire to just have a quick peep to see what was going on. We had some friends over for dinner. Once they had headed home my wife and I stayed up chatting. I confessed about my new relationship with 120 people that I hardly new. I showed her what I had been up to. Relief. Sharing was half the battle. She laughed. “It’s pathetic, what are all these people doing?”. I showed her more, we laughed together this time. I suddenly had an urge to delete my account. The wine definitely helped. Options, Set up, Account, DELETE. Phew. A wave of relief swept over me.

Reading this you may be thinking that the problem here is not Twitter, it is how I was using it. I can not deny that my character is particularly susceptible to be overrun by something like Twitter, but, I could not help but notice that I was not the only one that Twitter had got a grip on. That is why it works so well - it sucks people in, as they feel the need to be part of the constant stream of conversation.

So, did I learn much during my week on Twitter? Did I influence anyone? I don’t think I learnt anything that I would not have picked up elsewhere. I read some blog posts an hour or two before I would have picked them up. However, a few people did read this blog that otherwise would not have done. That is why I signed up - we are launching soon, and we are starting to get our communicating channels in place.

We will use Twitter, but when we do we will need some firm objectives and someone who can handle being plugged in to 100s of people without getting sucked in.

Image via Wikipedia

I have been reading about Boxee on Fred Wilson’s blog but thought it would be focusing solely on the US market. Yesterday I read that it worked with the iPlayer, so I took it for a spin last night.

Boxee is essentially a digital media entertainment hub. It allows you to aggregate all of your digital media from your computer and channels you like on the web in one place. You can then play back through your telly or watch on your computer.

I am a big fan of the iPlayer - I don’t love TV enough to record stuff, but it is great to be able to find something you want to watch when that telly moment comes. Boxee takes this one step further, offering a service which will eventually allow you to watch anything on demand from one place. This feels like the first time that the bridge between the internet and the TV has been built effectively. It will be interesting to see if Boxee ends up being the EPG for the digitally converged living room.

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This morning three of the top ten posts on techme are predicting more pain for the newspaper industry. The Guardian interviews Clay Shirky here, Slate has a piece on “How newspapers tried to invent the web” and the Atlantic predicts that offline papers, notably the New York Times, will disappear sooner rather than later here.

The industry certainly faces an enormous challenge. In the US and the UK much of this pain has come directly from the sudden drop in advertising revenue from the property sector. In 2009 estate agents will focus their budgets on the web. The issue will be that by the time the economy and the housing market recovers they will have adopted new ways of doing things and I doubt that they will start to redirect more money off line. Newspapers have to radically change. I doubt they will physically disappear, as people enjoy reading a physical paper, but they will have to drastically change the way they operate.

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The other day I was doing my daily trawl of news using my trusty netvibes when I came across one of those Google killer articles. My initial reaction was to ignore it as I do not need a new search engine. However, for some reason I had a quick read.

The article was about Kosmix. Kosmix is in fact not a search engine, it is a “topic guide”. What it does is group together lots of sources of information from Google, Wikipedia, YouTube etc about something you want to know more about. I would say it is more of a Wikipedia killer…

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I have just read Jon Fine’s column in Business Week - he interviewed Michael Wolff, who wrote the new Rupert Murdoch bio The Man Who Owns The News Here is an exerpt:

Michael Wolff: MySpace. They [meaning News Corp] know they have a huge problem. They’re quaking in their boots about MySpace. It always was a little rustling when I was there, there was this rustling—

Jon Fine: What do you identify as the problem?

MW: Facebook.

JF: OK. But Facebook is still smaller in America, and—

MW: Absolutely. But you know the rhythms of the Internet business, which I think are still, at this point, immutable. Something else comes along - a better technology, a better flavor of the month - and you, the former, are downgraded. Possibly to the point of being downgraded out of existence.

You can read the whole article here.

I have been an avid follower of MySpace v Facebook over the last 3 years. The two businesses initially had markedly different strategies. MySpace traded on being the cool place to hang out, driven by its band pages. Facebook has always been focused on being a “social utility”, replicating real world relationships online and providing new and innovative ways of communicating with friends on many different levels.

About a year ago, MySpace finally did something about the usability of its site - it redesigned its profile pages and introduced a range of Facebook like features.

The problem MySpace has, is that it does not really know what it is. There are now lots of places to find and share music and videos which work better than MySpace (LastFM, YouTube etc) and it is not as good at connecting people as Facebook. With no USP and some highly focused and ambitious competitors you can understand why News Corp might be losing sleep about MySpace.

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I have just been catching up on Fred Wilson’s blog and was interested to see his post on Joe The Plumber’s Landing Page. The post basically says that Google should improve its Google Local service to provider better landing pages for small businesses (skinning, own URL, call to action etc). Several Union Square Ventures‘ portfolio companies are in the business of helping advertisers target local businesses - so I can see why he would like Google to help solve their landing page problem as this would bring more of them in to the market for being sold online advertising.

Google Local is already a very powerful resource - I can see that if Google does improve its service, this could put traditional directories such as Yellow Pages and Thompson Local under even more pressure. These companies have been slow to innovate, it may now be too late to grab their slice of the online pie.

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The Estate Agent

Originally uploaded by henry_yates

The Estate Agent interviewed estatecreate in their April issue. Unfortunately it is print only, so here is a screenshot.

4th FEBRUARY, 2010 – estatecreate has launched a new service for estate agents that will drive more web traffic to their properties from search engines.

Search Engines such as Google are putting more and more emphasis on website content and domain names. By using estatecreate websites to showcase properties on key street names in an agency’s neighbourhood, agents will increase their search traffic and drive more leads to their properties.

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said “Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools available to estate agents. By investing in SEO you should see increased traffic and increased business for years to come. Our SEO solution is part of the overall package estate agents buy into when they sign up to estatecreate.”

The service is very easy to set up. First an agent needs to identify key roads where they sell houses in their neighbourhood.

The agent then sets up estatecreate sites for the key addresses around the agent’s branch. These sites will all point back to the estate agent’s website. Whenever the agent has a property for sale on a key road, they showcase it on the appropriate website. You can see an example website here: http://dovehousestreetsw3.com/

estatecreate is a new tool for estate agents to showcase a vendor’s home with a standalone website for their property with its own domain name. The service is very easy to use - estatecreate takes a feed of data from each branch and the agent can then easily add content and publish to a domain name of their choice.

The service is the holder of The Negotiator’s Innovation Award and the Web Marketing Association’s WebAward.

estatecreate was founded by Henry Yates and is the first company to offer this service to estate agents in the UK. Yates is an experienced entrepreneur who has previously co-founded and sold two businesses, Face, the research and planning agency (www.facegroup.co.uk, sold to Cello PLC) and Univillage.com, the social network for students (sold to www.sub.tv).