FSBL Platform 2010 is finally getting close. We finalized the overall platform feature list as well as the free demo behavior yesterday. This means that we know what the target is for release now after the new year and specifically what that release will look like. Innovation and ease of use are the watchwords for this release – it’s really going to be special.
Exciting times…
You haven’t heard much from us lately. We’ve always been out on the forward edge of rich media functionality doing things that now are “cool” before they were cool. We’re continuing that tradition.
A few months ago, we rolled out some experimental functionality to several non-real estate enterprise customers. The response was awesome enough that we have been “heads-down” to roll out a production version of it with the changes that they came back with. It’s a set of deep changes for us so we want to be sure that we have all of the bases covered and the functionality fully tested before rolling it out to other companies.
Note that some of the work that we are doing has occasionally impacted our live environment for reasons that we’ll discuss when we launch in December. Though we haven’t seen any new impacts, we apologize in advance for any issues.
The new functionality that we will be releasing aren’t small changes or simply putting a new shine on an old product…it will totally shift how you think about and deliver rich content to your customers via your web sites. See you soon….
We’ve taken a different approach to syndicating online content than most vendors. Our method brings the viewer back to the broker’s site to consume content rather than our site(s) or a third party site. It can best be described as syndicating the opportunity and brand rather than the content. The content is consumed on your website where the chances for customer capture are most rewarding for you.
Incidentally, Google will also index the syndicated content on your site rather than ours which is quite a different approach than most vendors.
You’ll be seeing a lot more about this theme soon.
You may or may not know that we maintain 4 english language blogs around various aspects of video concepts, platform issues, and real estate marketing. It’s caused a bit of “blog schizophrenia” while writing for different audiences because we really didnt have a way to consolidate the blog content in a way that made sense. heck, some of you may not even that we have hundreds of other blog posts in other places than this blog.
Since Vidlisting is undergoing a re-design, we figured it may be a good time to prioritize dealing with this schizophrenic approach to blogging. We ended up with a auto updating single blog page for the 4 blogs that (finally) makes sense of different blog themes and topics.
You can see what we’ve done at http://blog.vidlisting.com. Feel free to leave feedback.
Enjoy! (Real estate video uploaded by Dale Chumbley)
Update: After posting this blog article, we’ve since consolidated all of our API overviews in a single location on the ForSaleByLocals commercial site. You can find the API overview to get a list of files from a folder. there.
We have a new release of functionality in the next few days that adds much of functionality that you have been asking for. Some of the functionality is specific to the social network at http://social.vidlisting.com and some will be available as part of the regular upload process.
New Functionality As Part Of The Video Upload: Many of you have asked for a specific capability that you’ve seen on certain websites. Perhaps we are wrong but as far as we can tell, Youtube and the other major video upload websites dont offer it, but it’s one of the most requested features that we get. We’ll have the feature available as part of the video upload process with this new release next week.
Adding More Tools That Allow Interaction With Customers Outside of The Social Network: We continue to add tools that allow members of the social network to successfully interact outside the social network.
Personalizing How You Look Within The Social Network: We’ve added a bunch of administrative functionality to the social network so you can do things like automatically resize and choose how you want to crop your photos. If you dont want to upload your photo, we’ve expanded the choices of default images that you’ll be able to choose from.
Putting The “Organization” in Organizational Features: Organizations are our lifeblood. There are few, if any, other videos that are providing organization specific features for you. We’ve added more in this release.
We are really excited about the gains that we have made with the real estate social network over the past few months. Join the hundreds of others that are changing the way that real estate is being done on the web.
We’ll have more specific details once we release.
We had our best video view month ever with just over 100,000 videos viewed for the month of April 2008. Thank you all and continue enjoying our work – we have a new set of infrastructure and distribution partners as well as our social networking application (http://catalog.vidlisting.com) which will continue to grow views in the future.
I’m always a bit confused when people talk about social functionality using the context of specific social networking sites. Never mind that there are only a few social networking sites that are more urban than wasteland. Ignore the fact that even on the populated social networking sites, groups spring up with great fanfare and are quickly populated and just as quickly lay dormant. Let’s forget all of that for a moment.
Let’s think of social networking sites as online versions of cocktail parties. A cocktail party is a destination…you go and then come back. What occurs at the cocktail party is actually what makes the party “social” not just simply showing up. Trust fund babies can easily afford to attend the same parties with the same people. However, to be socially successful in a business context, the goal should be to attend different cocktail parties, strengthen old acquaintances, and also continually make new ones.
The online versions of social networking often resemble a single cocktail party with more or less the same guests. In some cases, the arrival times of certain regular guests are completely predictable. How many more of the same parties do we need as an industry?
What then how could we possibly think about functionality that is different?
- Make “social” an approach rather than a destination: Getting people to join the conversation no matter where they might be socially located would be an interesting change. I’m unaware of good social tools that span specific webites (the promise of social platforms may end up meaning that vampires can bite you on more than one social network).
- Blur the line between industry focused destinations and consumer destinations: Few, if any social sites, seemed really focused on being a single type of destination. ActiveRain is generally considered an industry social destination while listing or general social sites tend to be more consumer focused. The true power of the social approach vs destination would be the blurring of these lines between consumer destinations and industry destinations. Participants could leverage the access to knowledge that crossing website social lines can bring in terms of content and personalities regardless of their intended destination or current waypoint. The social approach would therefore have functionality aimed at discoverability matching content with people’s information needs across industry or consumer destination. So, for instance, applicable Facebook, Real Estate Shows, or other content could be available to me whether I knew about the specific site or not.
- Remove email as a primary cross site distribution mechanism: Though email for many has been the killer app for some time, its use is less friendly than ever. Our thinking is that if a friend sees something that may be of interest to me, they should be able to just send it to me with a few clicks rather than go to email to send it to me. We are all busy and inundated with unwanted email. Things like opening an email app, potentially having spam filters delay my content, or having to pick up the phone anyway to ask if they received my email can interrupt an otherwise seamless social process. After receipt, I should just be able to publish it for others to see without having to cut and paste a link or know how to position a video player. In short, the less technical obstacles and 3rd party tools to open the better.
- Increase discoverability of content: The rewards of great position in search engie result pages is tangible. However, there is often great non-SEO optimized and applicable short tail content that exists deep in the results of online searches. Social functionality should play a role in making such content more discoverable and assist in aggregating long tail content.
Stay tuned….
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