[ed298] My Web2.0 Diary, part 5 of 5

Zillow and Craigslist are the two websites I've mentioned this week because I'm house hunting. Craigslist has changed the way we look for housing. It' amazing. People post stuff on their everyday because it's free and it tends to cater to the "just-in-time" needs because everything is listed as vacant now. I guess what happens then is people tend to visit frequently. So where am I going? An essential element to some of these online tools is having a critical mass of content and users. Having that critical mass is what affords craigslist it's success. It could be argued that it was the accessiblity of the tool - ie it's free. Because it's free it, it has a low barrier to entry which again supports the critical mass theory. Zillow on the other hand is a relative new comer. It looks like a mash-up of Google and real estate data. I saw this one beautiful heat-map on real estate prices
posted on the Zillow blog. The service keeps it's own blog. Notice that the area at Stanford is light blue even though we are sitting on some of the hottest property. The map actually shows the estimated sales prices of homes divided by the square foot. Sales prices are determined by comparable recent sales. Zillow is a great model of Web 2.0 spirited technology.