Adding Real Estate Shows Via API

We continue to add to the FSBL multimedia and marketing API set with the latest addition allowing you to add a Real Estate Show (RES) to either your social network workspace or your app’s hierarchical storage out in the cloud. This means that web developers can manage RES content within their own applications with none of the heachaches associated with permissions, folders, or access.

The details of how to use the RES API are at http://api.forsalebylocals.com/docs/AddRESToFolder

Making Video Widgets More Effective With Office Documents And PDF Support

This weekend, we’ll release a feature that will add Microsoft Office documents and Adobe PDFs as media types that can be shared within our social networking workspaces.  You’ll be able to do everything with these types of documents that you can do with videos and real estate shows at http://social.vidlisting.com – seamlessly and quickly share them with other members without cutting and pasting links, include them in individual and grouped widgets, and know how many times that the documents have been viewed.

We have two unique features related to documents that we’ll demonstrate in detail once the functionality is live.

– Easily associate an office document or PDF file with a video or real estate show: This is more than just adding a document to a video bar or grouped widget. Once released this weekend, your video and real estate shows widgets can carry along and display an associated document that viewers can click on from either the embedded widget or the player page. These associated documents can be added at will to Youtube videos, real estate shows, or videos uploaded to vidlisting. They can also be  removed or changed at any time via the newly designed widget creation interface.

– Directly Communicate Through The Widget With The Person Posting The Document With One Mouse Click: Like videos, viewers of document widgets will be able to communicate directly with the member that posted the document using the messaging platform built into http://social.vidlisting.com. The messaging capability will function from anywhere that the document widget is posted

Let’s use real estate as an example.  A member of the vidlisting social network has a Real Estate Show of a property in their workspace, a PDF with the listing information, and an Vidlisting agent introduction or even a local community video posted on Youtube. The member can easily combine all of these into a single video widget specifically for the property that has a link to the listing PDF as well as a link to the agent’s profile video or community video. The listing virtual tour remains the primary focus of the widget but rich supporting information is now part of the video widget as well in a variety of different media formats. 

Any interested buyers can get to each of the disparate media types from either the video widget for the property or the player page.  In addition, interested sellers in the same area can also communicate directly with the agent to request a listing presentation. At any time, the member can review where the widget has been posted, how many times the widget has been viewed, and how many clickthroughs it has received.

Now that’s making web 2.0 work for you. Stay tuned…

Shared Media Catalogs: The Easy Way To Build Your Business With Video

What Are Shared Media Catalogs?

Shared media catalogs are a way for video content producers to allow people to view video and other media content as if it were their own as well as build widgets and video bars for inclusion in their own blogs/websites.

Here is a short video that shows just how easy it is to add two shared catalogs (one has mixed content from YouTube, Vidlisting, and Real Estate Shows) to a user’s personal media catalog and then build a video bar widget with content from *both* shared catalogs.  It is in real time and takes only a few seconds.  The video bar widget that you see at the end is a live widget with embed code below.

Only content that has been explicitly “shared” by you will be viewable by those that want to consume your content.  There are two types of shareable catalogs – Public and Permissive. Public catalogs are open to everyone that subscribes (explained below) but Permissive catalogs require the catalog owner’s approval to view shared content.

The catalogs currently work with Real Estate Shows, Youtube videos, and any content uploaded to any of the ForSaleByLocals video platform providers. Our implementation marks a disruptive new level of progress in the way that video and virtual tour widgets are created and manipulated in the multimedia space.

Why Are Shared Media Catalogs Important?

Shared media catalogs allow your customers, friends, and just interested parties “pull” your content to see what you have selected to let them see rather than “pushing” content to them.

Video channels have been historically been parking spaces for video content. The only way content could leave the channel is for the user to either have enough HTML knowledge to cut and paste the embed code and have a website (or blog) where they could put the content or paste in emails every time that they want to share the content.

Things are much easier with Media Catalogs. Content in the form of video podcasts, property videos, real estate shows, video interviews, agent introduction videos, spots or just about any type of video content now no longer requires technical skills to distribute, syndicate, or simply just get to other people.  Neither you nor your customers, friends, acquaintances need to worry about readers, feeds, RSS, or anything technical. The content does not even need to be in the same video or mltimedia platform – the video can also be stored in Youtube or can be stored as a virtual tour over at Real Estate Shows. Everything is visual and accessible within 3-4 mouse clicks. It is the easiest way to make video and other multimedia content accessible to those with interest in your product or service.

Your content will shortly be exportable in many more ways without having to know HTML. Soon to be released version 1.0 of our WordPress plugin will let you to directly insert media content from shared catalogs into hosted wordpress blogs. Additionally, a developer application programming interface (API) into our platform will let programmers easily build custom web applications using media catalog as virtual web storage for multimedia. Lots of exciting things are coming.

You can see a detailed how-to over on the Vidlisting real estate video blog.

How Can I Get My Own Shared Media Catalog?

Anyone can consume an available public catalog without permission and permissive catalogs with the owner’s approval. Sharing your own media catalog is normally a paid level of functionality. You must first open your own media catalog and then upgrade your membership to do so.

We are however inviting selected media content providers the opportunity to offer their own content during the shared catalog beta period (approx. the next 30 days). Participation in the beta means that you’ll have a year’s free use of the functionality if approved. Please contact me at sales@forsalebylocals.com to request participation.