TechnoBabble

Sharpen Your Social Skills

I wanted to call this one "Sharpen UR Social Skilz" but I get a lot of grief when I speak 1337.

 

For a guy who has a Twitter account, a Facebook account and a blog, I don’t spend a lot of time actually using them. I don't like spewing out the minutiae of my day. In addition, I work on a lot of stuff that I can't share with the public. I also don't have enough time to link and retweet good articles from all over the web. I follow people who are good at that.

 

I do try to keep up with the posts for those I follow. I'd hate for something important to zoom by without at least a quick look.

 

You know what I see?

 

Lots and lots and lots of posts.

 

We are again confronted with the Information Overload Monster from Planet Z! But just like Tokyo, we start to become desensitized after the city is flattened a few times. There is MORE information passing through your field of control now than ever before.

 

Old fashioned snail-mail was replaced by the telephone. Telephone was replaced by the fax. The fax was replaced by email. Email was replaced by web sites. Web sites were replaced by blogs, instant messaging, tweets and Facebook status updates.

 

I remember when instant messaging and blogs started taking off and it was said that email was dead. Long live the king. But you know what? I don't get fewer emails now than I did five years ago. It seems to me to be about the same. But now we have all the little spawn of email and web sites running around as well.

 

More and more of our communication with other people is occurring though social networks. It is a great way to keep in touch with family, friends and colleagues. It has the immediacy of a phone call without the barking dog in the background or the awkward discussion about the weather. And the great thing about Facebook and Twitter is that if you want, you don't have to reply.

 

When someone sends you an email message, there is a reasonable expectation on the part of both parties that there should be some sort of reply. This is a targeted communication and as such requires confirmation that the information was received, understood and possibly acted upon.

 

This is not the case with the social networks. When you have hundreds of followers on Twitter or an equal number on Facebook, every post is not designed to generate a response from everyone. Instead it is an invitation. An invitation to engage, or not, as you see fit.

 

Managing this torrent of information is difficult.

 

Let me help.

 

Using the Twitter or Facebook website as your primary interface is fine if you only have only one of these networks, and not both. Even then, if you follow hundreds of accounts on Twitter, the web site is not that great. If you have hundreds of very active friends on Facebook ["active" means all of your friends spending their day playing Mafia Wars, FarmTown, Scramble, Roller Coaster Kingdom, Farmville, Vampire Wars, Castle Age, iHeart or the countless quizzes], so much is happening so fast that if you walk away for a few minutes you can miss dozens of posts.

 

"OMG!!! What did I miss?"

 

What you need is an application that helps track your Twitter and Facebook accounts and puts everything together for you in one place. Fortunately, there are a few you can choose from.

 

These all run on your computer. There are others for your smart phone. After all, not all of us have the good fortune to be tied to their computer all day. I'll post my thoughts on the mobile apps soon.

 

TweetDeck

 

I use TweetDeck. TweetDeck has a nice interface and is easy to use. It can display posts from Twitter, Facebook and MySpace. It is more geared to Twitter so it supports searches on Twitter but not the others.

 

You can also write one status update and have it post to Twitter, Facebook or both. That saves time when you are maintaining more than one network. You can configure both Twitter and Facebook to automatically update the other when one is updated. However, using TweetDeck to select which network the update goes to when you write it seems the most flexible.

 

TweetDeck is configurable so you can organize the network feeds by your priority. It also has a nice notification pop-up on screen when a new post comes in. It even makes a little "tweet-tweet" sound. If you're into that sort of thing.

 

The TweeDeck beta is free for download here.

 

Sobees lite

 

I had seen some favorable posts about sobees and decided to give it a test drive.

 

All I can say is "meh".

 

It makes a great Twitter-only application although it was designed to do more. It is nice to look at and easy to use. It allows you to search Twitter.  It allows you to post updates to Twitter and/or Facebook much like TweetDeck.

 

From the moment I installed it, though, I've had a problem. It does not connect to Facebook correctly for me. I complete the account information and login and the Facebook column appears. It is completely empty. There are no posts, no friends list and no profile. I've tried connecting again and again and it always shows me an empty column.

 

Talk about a blow to your self-esteem.

 

Friendly Co-worker: "Hey, what are all your friends posting about?"

 

Me: "Oh, you know. Real estate technology."

 

FC: "There's no posts there."

 

Me: "There's some sort of Internet issue."

 

FC: "How sad. You don’t have any friends, do you?"

 

Sobees lite is in "alpha". That is supposed to mean that it is still in development and hasn't been through Quality Assurance testing. I think lazy development shops just call it "alpha" so users can’t really complain about bugs.

 

If you only use Twitter I'd recommend you give sobees lite a try. You can download the free version here.

 

Digsby

 

Digsby takes the integrated service model one step further and will also put together your email and instant messaging with your social networks.

 

It isn’t as great as it sounds. It is primarily an instant message client. It is small and isn’t the easiest to use to manage all of your posts on Twitter or Facebook.

 

 Google

We now come to the company with a finger in every pie.

Google is rolling out a social networking integrated search called Google Friend Connect. What they have done is combined a regular Google search with searches of your Twitter and Facebook feeds. This allows you to track your Twitter and Facebook contacts while organizing all of the information you may care about.

This is a very cool idea. It is only a precursor, however, to what they are really working on: Google Wave.

Google Wave has the lofty goal of being the realization of true personal interactivity on the web. (My marketing mumbo-jumbo, not theirs) 

Wave is in development and still a ways out before general release.

To get the most out of the social networks you participate in, you need to get organized. These are just a few of the applications that can help you do that. 

Share your thoughts on products that have worked with you.

 

And now for the bit that the FCC, FTC, NSA and CIA require from me…

 

Disclosure: I use a free beta copy of TweetDeck. I have tried sobees lite. I have not paid for either and have not been paid by either company to try these products. I will return the electrons to these companies as soon as my evaluation period is complete and I can get the damn tiny things back into my monitor. Digsby took 10 minutes of my time that I can never get back. I have a Gmail account and like it just fine.

 

Real Estate Standards in 2010

The election is currently underway for the Real Estate Standards Organization (RESO) board of directors. This is important because the people that make up the board of directors have a unique position to drive the direction of the RETS standard as we roll into 2010.

 

I first became involved with RETS as a consumer of real estate data back in 2002. A that time, I needed regular updates of listing data. I managed a team aggregating listing data and the replication of that data to my database was my focus.

 

In 2005 I returned to the MLS vendor realm. As an MLS vendor our primary concern was the RETS server. Things like security, data control, high-volume performance and client support were our focus. It is interesting how your demands from RETS so significantly change when your job changes.

 

In addition to a focus on the RETS server, most MLS vendors now also supply RETS clients of one sort or another. Some developed a desktop application to use RETS for building local data files. Some build RETS client libraries to provide data for various search products.

 

It turns out the uses for RETS are as diverse as the community supporting it. I think that diversity is an important consideration as we think about where RETS goes from here. We've spent that last year concentrating on the compliance tool and because of that, little effort has been directed at meeting some of the business needs of the industry.

 

I believe that RESO needs to focus on business cases and enhancing the RETS standard to meet those business cases. There is so much more to this world than replicating listing databases from one location to another. Syndication is important. Data security is important. Standard fields are important. New transport methods like Representational State Transfer (REST) are important.

 

Most of the decade since RETS was conceived has been spent building a technical foundation for exchanging real estate data. Now we need to focus on "why" we are exchanging real estate data. New products and services have opened up new areas of thought about how real estate data can be used and what it's value is. We need to grasp the possibilities and create an environment where creativity can drive solutions to real problems.

 

The nominees for the RESO BOD are all familiar with RETS and have committed, in one way or another, to using RETS in the real world. The various points of view will ensure some fresh ideas and lively discussion. That's a good start.

 

I'm one of the nominees and hope I get the chance to work with some of the brightest in the industry and do some great things.

 

Vote early and vote often!

The Rise of the Mobile Machine

Last Friday (October 2) I had the honor of sitting on a panel at the CMLS Conference.  The title of the panel was "The Outer Limits of Mobile Technology". It was moderated by Amy Geddes from Clareity Security. The other two panelists were Lisa Herrin from Hawaii Information Systems and David Gibbons from Zillow.

 

The panel discussed how mobile technology is impacting the real estate industry. The crowd was surveyed about their plans for mobile technology and also what kinds of mobile devices they carry.

 

Have you heard of this Apple iPhone? I think it may catch on. Sarcasm, people. About 30% of the attendees carried an iPhone.

 

Despite the momentum of the iPhone in the market, it is only one of a growing category of phones that blur the lines between cellular phone and laptop computer. This category includes BlackBerry, the Palm Pre, the T-Mobile G1 and countless other "smart phones".

 

The important thing to keep in mind, in my opinion, is that these devices don't run all the same software. Sure you will get an email client, contact manager and web browser, but you want more. There are developers out there writing programs that do very specific (and cool) things for these various devices. However, because of how these devices are built and the operating system they use, these programs won't necessarily run on every device.

 

This sort of thing is an important consideration when buying a smart phone. You need to figure out what you will be doing with it. If your job requires specific software, you need to make sure your smart phone is compatible. If you use your smart phone for personal use only, think about how it could make your life more fun. You may want a camera and web access to Facebook. It's a great way to share photos and videos with friends and family. You can keep in touch using text messages or Twitter.

 

Once you know what you need a phone to do, you need to hold them in your hands and try them.

 

I use my iPhone for email. Since my job is technical, many words I write in an email are not commonly used in everyday conversation. Phones that have a numeric keypad with groups of letters assigned to each number are virtually impossible to use in my situation. Our former QA Manager had a BlackBerry Pearl with this type of keypad. He could read email fine, but trying to write an email was very difficult. My iPhone has a QWERTY keyboard. A QWERTY keyboard is like a typewriter. All the letters of the alphabet are visible and the first six letters in the top row of keys, from left to right, are Q-W-E-R-T-Y. I find it much easier to type using this type of keyboard.

 

        

Numeric Keypad QWERTY Keyboard

There is more to it than just the keyboard. Some phones just don’t feel right in your hand. Some have screens that you have trouble seeing. Some set against your ear uncomfortably. Try on phones like you would a pair of shoes. Your phone should feel good first, look good second.

 

Let's broaden our discussion a little bit and move past phones.

 

When we say "mobile devices", we're not just talking about phones. Granted, smart phones are common these days, but the popularity of all kinds of devices is on the rise.

 

Netbooks are very small laptops. They are more portable than normal laptops, often include built-in wireless networking and are the hot personal accessory for today's geek. Anyone that has lugged an 8 pound laptop around an office all day can appreciate the super light weight of a netbook.

 

I showed the CMLS crowd my Nintendo DSi. The DSi is a handheld game console. It has two built-in digital cameras, an SD memory card slot and wi-fi support. It plays MP3 music files. You can download a web browser. It's practically a laptop in you hand.

Nintendo DSi

Even your car can be a mobile device. OnStar and Sync provide connectivity between your car and the Internet. Now you can drive your computer around town.

 

The point I am trying to make is that mobile devices are more than just phones. Open your mind to the possibilities. Everything connected and talking to each other. Another example of science fiction becoming science fact.

Is that a fork stuck in the RETS road?

We’re coming out of a difficult year for RETS (#rets) and RESO. Many outside (and some inside) observers wonder if anything’s been done in the last 12 – 18 months. It’s a valid question when you look at the forward progress of the standard.

 

There has been virtually none.

 

However, the effort expended by both RESO and the server developers has been considerable. We have a shiny new compliance tool to measure our worthiness. RETS servers will now be speaking the same RETS dialect. Client applications should be more portable from RETS server to RETS server.

 

Will there be a direct benefit to the REALTOR® or MLS organization? Probably not much in the short term.

 

Was this a colossal waste of time? Actually, no. It sure feels like it, though. Why is that?

 

There are a number of factors that must be met to ensure a project's success. You must have a good plan, good specifications, good people and enough time. In software development we talk about the Golden Triangle: Money, Scope and Time. If you want it faster, you need to spend more money or reduce scope. If you want more scope, you need to add money or time. If you want it cheaper…you see where this goes.

 

The real world is messy, people. Software development makes the real world look like the land of sunshine and lollipops. There are always delays and overruns. There is always what we call "scope creep". This means more requirements get added to the project after you've already started.

 

So the compliance tool project had all three of the Golden Triangle points working against it. NAR was imposing a deadline. There was only so much time. The scope of the project was fairly well defined as far as RESO was concerned ("Here is the RETS standard, make a test for it"). However, I think Hitachi underestimated the effort. This is common when consultants come into an area where they don’t have a great deal of experience. What may have seemed obvious to a RETS veteran was less so to their dev team. (All props to Paula and the Compliance Workgroup. They made sure this thing was going to work.) Finally, where's the money coming from? NAR and CRT for this project. I doubt this was a high priority on NAR's budget plans. This could not be an unrestrained spending spree. We must thank them for paying for it. Of course, they also mandated it.

 

Despite the delays and frustration endured by a lot of good folks, we've got a good tool that will help us grow up a little more as a true standard.

 

Now it's time to get to work on the things that allow us to move forward in a very visible way. Things like data standardization, data synchronization, new transport methods, predefined data sets for specific use cases and much more.

 

We just finished the Fall RESO meetings. They were good meetings with lively discussion and a lot of food for thought. Time was spent yesterday and this morning discussing ideas for the future. It feels like a pivotal time for the community. I don't think the future has been as wide open as it is right now since the very beginning of RETS.

 

I think that's pretty cool.

May I Help You?

My Mom has the kind of relationship with her computer that primitive man had with the pagan gods. She is simultaneously in a state of wonder…and fear.

 

My Mom is terrified of pushing a button she should not push. I guess she thinks she's going to unleash nuclear Armageddon or something. She is not the only person out there who feels this way. It may be a gross generalization but I think that almost everyone older than Generation X has a difficult relationship with their computer and digital technology.

 

To be fair, it's not their fault. When you grow up in an age of vacuum tubes and AM radio, the power of digital technology can be intimidating. Your computer can appear smarter than you are. Hell, your phone has a PhD and you carry that around in your pocket where it can keep an eye on you. There are plenty of books that the older generation grew up with that warned against the uprising of the machines.

 

Allow me to put Mom and everyone else at ease. Your computer is NOT out to get you. The guy at the other end of the wire attached to your computer is who is out to get you. But you know what? He's only human.

 

Maybe I can help you.

 

When I was thirteen years old, I joined the computer club at school. We had three TRS-80's with 4K of RAM in the back of a math classroom. Everyone else in the club was an upperclassman. Needless to say, I didn't get much computer time. Luckily, Dad recognized that dull glint in my eye (You know the one. All the kids today have it.) and saw that I had found a calling.

 

Dad brought home a TRS-80 for my own. I never asked but I think it was a "spare" from work. It had a tape recorder for saving data to cassette tape and even a modem that you could set your telephone handset on to talk to another computer that was also talking through a telephone handset. Of course, I didn't know anybody else that had a computer much less a modem.

 

I taught myself BASIC and have been a code jockey ("programmer") ever since. Along the way I've dealt with a lot of technology. From smart phones to servers, digital cameras to GPS, I've loved them all.

 

Today, my job is real estate software. I've been building it for fifteen years. Most of what will follow on this blog will be geared toward real estate technology and software. Even so, there should be a little something for everyone who lives in fear of their digital devices.

Deny your fear.