Kaboom!
Everything around you just blew up.
Will you survive?
Shrapnel
According to William Gibson, the future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.
Gibson believes the future is ever present. It’s spread about in particle form waiting for someone to piece it together. Given the persistent inter-connectivity of people through the giant digital network called the Internet, this piecing together – the work of innovation – now occurs very, very fast.
Trulia has released an iPhone app for agents.
It’s pretty simple, really. Agents can check-in to properties, receive push notifications for new leads from Trulia, organize contacts and search for property.
It’s a good idea. Agents are Trulia’s customers, after all, so why wouldn’t they want to engage them in this way?
But what is most interesting here is that agents earn badges and points – those potent bits of ego-tickling ephemera – for doing things within the app. Trulia then creates a “Leaderboard” ranking agents by these accumulations.
This is going to be an interesting experiment in “gamification” within real estate.
Turning apps into games where users earn points, badges, rewards and recognition as they check-in, level up, or connect with others has been engagement catnip for apps like Foursquare, Get Glue, Scvngr and others. It’s also been over-hyped and applied in ways that are pretty silly.
But I think game mechanics can be potent in real estate. ActiveRain was early on this, offering points for activity within the network. They grew like a weed. But there hasn’t been a large-scale play in this vein since.
Picture the festive army of Realtors at the NAR show wearing ribbons, badges, blinking lights and other tokens of status. Consider the affinity for designations and their display that marks our industry, or the competitive drive that makes a real estate office buzz.
Now look at the visuals for the Trulia app below. Points. Badges. Faces of other agents staring back at the user. It’s a brilliant taunt.
Now politically… this could be a little touchy. Because agents are the customers of someone else: their broker. And brokers provide the listings that make Trulia possible. To the extent that brokers perceive this as diminishing their gravitational pull over agents, it’s going to raise some hackles.
But hackles or no hackles, we should keep an eye on how this plays out.
Here are the screen caps:
My eighteen month-old daughter woke up last Saturday at 5:00 a.m. and decided that it was time for Daddy to be awake too.
After brewing a strong cup of coffee, we sat down to play. Half an hour later she decided she was still tired and needed to go back to bed.
All the caffeine coursing through Daddy’s veins meant he wasn’t so lucky.
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2011 was a big year. 2012 will surely be as exciting. As quickly as things change in technology, one thing’s for sure – they will keep changing. Here’s a few web trends that we think you ought to keep an eye on over the next twelve months:
1. Think mobile first
This week website monitoring company Royal Pingdom laid out a comprehensive view of the mobile web in numbers. One of the more staggering statistics: Cisco estimates that by 2015 mobile data traffic will grow by a factor of 26 and during that timeframe more than 5.6 billion devices will be connected to mobile networks.
We’re rocketing towards a world where a mobile device may be the only way people connect to the Web (especially in the developing world) and where the increase in the number of mobile form factors (smartphones, tablets) creates an ever expanding corps of new opportunities for website owners to present their brands to consumers.
We’re quickly moving to a place where mobile access will be a primary requirement for any brand. For companies contemplating their web presence in 2012, designing mobile first will become the norm.
The cold December wind blew my son and I into a local vintage shop.
I focused on old comics. He stuck his fingers inside the dial of a red plastic box, removed a heavy object connected to a long coil and asked if it was a phone.
It took me a second to realize this was his first encounter with one of these things.
“How do you send a text with it?” he asked.
This morning I had a talk with a real estate website.
Ok. It wasn’t exactly a heady discourse, but it was pretty neat nonetheless:
Earlier this year, I had written a post wondering which portal would implement speech recognition first. Trulia seems to have won the race.
The voice recognition is pretty rudimentary really but overall fairly accurate. I could trip it up if I wanted to, but if I spoke clearly Trulia reliably returned the location I was looking for.
It began to feel pretty natural after a few minutes of testing. Far quicker and faster than typing. And as I used it more, I actually began to feel myself getting frustrated by its limitations too. This was a good thing.
I wanted to execute my whole search by speech – not just the location.
Look who’s talking
I get the limitations around speech – busy offices, noisy environments, etc. But for many simple searches conducted at home it’s perfectly acceptable. (I did, however, get a few sideways glances from my wife as I was talking to my computer.)
In fact, I might go as far as to say that once you get used to it, it begins to feel like a better way to conduct this type of query. “Real life” home search is all about asking questions, so services like Apple’s Siri and Trulia’s voice search may, in time, become the norm, not the exception.
It all reminds me of this scene from Star Trek IV – a classic, but perhaps just a little clairvoyant too:
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
Zillow bought Diverse Solutions this week, a great company that offers refreshingly usable IDX products.
What does it mean?
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
Glen Kelman just published a post announcing that Scouting Report, the controversial agent performance app the company released just four days ago, has been completely disabled.
This follows a storm of data failures, inaccuracies and MLS compliance faceplants.
I’ve excerpted Glenn’s post below, which candidly explains the decision.