Tzetze Fly

I’ve been using Jott now for a few weeks and it’s super useful.  You set up a (free) account, give it your e-mail address and phone number, and (optionally) any other friends e-mail addresses who you may want to Jott.  Once set up, you just dial Jott (a toll-free 866 number) and the automated system asks who you want to Jott and what your message is.  You can Jott “myself” or any friends name that you already set up on the web site.  A few minutes later, the recipient gets an e-mail with a text transcription of your message.  The voice to text translation works really well in my experience.

I use this all the time driving to or from work - anything I’m trying to remember, especially to do lists - I just Jott them and then I have a nice list waiting in my inbox when I get there.  Highly recommended.

From my experience.

1. “That sounds stupid.  Why would I want to use that?  My life is busy enough already.”
2. “Hey - this is kind of fun, especially at this conference.”
3. “Man, the web site is down a lot.”
4. “Cool - using twhirl will solve all my problems.”
5. “Hmmmm - I guess all of twitter is down a lot.”
6. “How can I live my life when twitter is f’ing down all the time!?!?!?!?!?”

An interesting post last night by Om Malik regarding possible business models for Twitter has sparked a lot of discussion. Here’s my two cents, and Om’s response.  Join in - either here or over there.

In my opinion, Amazon is doing more interesting work right now than Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!, yet those three continue to get more publicity. Here’s a great interview Scoble just did with Jeff Barr, Amazon’s Web Services Evangelist.

View video

To start the new year off right, Mike Wurzer composed a great open letter to all the public sites that expose listing data on behalf of brokers - including Yahoo!, Google, Trulia, and Zillow. It encourages the use of common data standards to make it easier, cheaper, and more efficient for brokers to upload listing data and keep it updated.

Right now, brokers have to spend time and money inputting their listing data into the numerous (and growing) consumer sites. If they develop technology to automate getting their data from the MLS or back office systems into one of these public sites, they still have to write code to interact with the API’s and data formats of each site individually. If you want your listings on a dozen sites, you must write code, test, debug, and keep updated with all dozen, and in a dozen different formats. I know that for RE/Max International (we run remax.com and handle around 75% of their US office traffic), the limiting factors for widespread syndication of their listing data has been cost and effort. Right now, we are syndicating listings for many offices to GoogleBase on their behalf, but that project has not been extended to other sites. Instead, it is left up to individual brokers or regions to handle their own listing syndication.

Over the past couple of years, the Schema Workgroup of RETS has done a fantastic job creating new XML schemas for real estate data sharing. The schemas describing listing data are particularly well developed, having been hammered on by MLS staff, MLS system vendors, client vendors, and other technical staff for over a year. Others in the real estate technology space would be well served to utilize this intellectual property - and help the RETS group improve on it - to accomplish the common goal of providing better tools and lower costs to the brokerage community. These standard schemas should easily fit into their current processes, utilizing simple XSLT transformations to convert the standard XML schema into their current proprietary schemas. This small addition to the workflow of a few sites would amount to a tremendous savings on the input side of thousands of participants - the brokers and the MLS’s - and encourage increased participation.

Only when we have consistent standards do we see an increase in the creation of tools, increases in efficiency, and lowering of costs. The participation of these leading web sites in the mission of the Real Estate Standards Organization will go a long way toward ensuring adoption of these standards.

Amazon is in a very giving mood this Christmas. They’ve added a new service to their stable of web services, and this is the big one everyone’s been waiting for - Amazon SimpleDB. This is a MAJOR inflection point in web development.

Look - this is beta, it might not work, it might not scale, etc, etc, but Amazon has shown a great track record with their web services (AWS) thus far. First was S3 - storage on demand. Next was EC2 - computing on demand. Lately they’ve added FPS - a flexible payment service, and they’ve had SQS - simple queue service - for a while now. Major sites are running one or more of these services in production right now, sites like New York Times and SmugMug. I even read somewhere that Microsoft is using S3 for storage on one of their sites.

SimpleDB sounds very similar to the CouchDB project I’ve covered in the past. It’s a schema-less data repository of name-value pairs with automatic indexing. It scales instantly, it’s pay per use, and it looks like it uses an API based on REST. Initial commentary indicates it’s using Erlang to accomplish this. More details regarding the API, performance, etc, will come out over the next few weeks as people start to exercise this.

I spend more and more of my time procuring equipement, retro-fitting equipment, dealing with power, cooling, and space issues, budgeting for neeeded equipment, estimating expenditures on future equipment - less and less time building cool stuff. Being able to get up and running in a day on these new services, trying out ideas at low cost, then tossing away bad products or expanding successful products - that’s the future - and it’s all coming into focus right now.

From my point of view, all Amazon is missing now is a proper load-balancing service. I’m guessing that is on tap for them in 2008. If they go the extra mile and make that load-balancer allow geo-graphical distribution of traffic to unique data centers, that would push this stuff into a whole other stratosphere.

Del.icio.us is one of the most useful web sites I’ve started using in the past couple of years. At it’s simplest level, it’s a way to move your web bookmarks out of your browser and into the internet “cloud” so that they are accessible on any computer you use. In the old days (that’s three years ago), you’d bookmark important sites on your office computer, then when you were at your home computer and you needed that site, you were out of luck. Now, with all your bookmarks in del.icio.us, you can get to those from anywhere. The site is free and now owned by Yahoo.

At a deeper level, you can tag every bookmark with keywords and add a description. If you have a lot of bookmarks, this makes them easy to find by a simple search box. In a sense, you’re creating your own little personal search engine - all sites you’ve bookmarked are now searchable by tag and by description. Bookmarks are public by default, but can be marked private for your logged in eyes only.

The format of del.icio.us urls are very straightforward - this is where the real power starts to come into play. To find all sites I’ve tagged with “ruby”, just go to:

http://del.icio.us/danwoolley/ruby

Del.icio.us calls itself “social bookmarking” and this example shows that off - all public bookmarks you make are easily accessible to others. Now when a friend asks you for information about web hosting companies, you can just send him a link that looks like this:

http://del.icio.us/danwoolley/web+hosting

and he’ll see everything you’ve tagged “web hosting” during your web surfing over the past year.

You can even access an RSS feed for these public bookmarks. If someone you trust is always uncovering juicy tidbits about real estate that are worth checking out, subscribe to their feed (for example) using:

http://del.icio.us/rss/donaldtrump/real+estate

Now every time they tag a page using those tags, it will appear in your blog reader.

Rather than a specific user’s bookmarks, you can look at those of the entire del.icio.us user base. Remember, these are sites that have been specifically marked by a human being as having useful information. For specific subjects, this can be even more relevant than general search sites like Google. The site has a very usable UI for searching, but here are some sample url shortcuts you can go to directly:

Sites tagged “web hosting” - http://del.icio.us/tag/web+hosting

Popular sites - http://del.icio.us/popular

Popular sites tagged “ruby” - http://del.icio.us/popular/ruby

As a Realtor, you could do something like tag listings that you’d like your buyers - the Robertson’s - to see at remax.com, then just e-mail them a single link - for example:

http://del.icio.us/debbiesellsboca/Robertson

or allow them to subscribe to a feed in their blog reader - for example :

http://del.icio.us/rss/debbiesellsboca/Robertson

Now whenever you bookmark a new listing and tag it “Robertson”, they will see it. You can even tag other pertinent information you want them to read, like articles about mortgage rates, schools in the area, market conditions, etc, and they will all appear in their blog reader.

If you’re using Firefox, there is a very useful extension available here. It puts a couple of buttons in your toolbar that make it super simple to bookmark any page and bring up your list of bookmarks without having to open the del.icio.us site.

Del.icio.us also has very good developer tools you can read about here. I’ll be showing off one of those in my next post.