Vidlisting Blog: Web Real Estate Video

The next release of the Vidlisting platform will have a much simplified configuration menu for content.  As I mentioned, we’ve applied a bunch of lessons from some of our recent non-real estate implementations and simplified both user navigation and the logic/code for our “Edit Content”page.

I wanted to post a screenshot in this post but I don’t want to give away some of the new things that we’ll have at launch which haven’t yet been mentioned. That said, please know that nothing was off the table for our code review and discussions…(we had an eye towards the smallest details such as “why the heck is the content editing page in the live vidlisting version still called ‘nxtest’? “).

I’ll briefly open the kimono a bit more. One of the things that gnawed at me for a long time was that widgets for a given video were previously never personalized within the  Edit Content page.  This gave widgets a different configuration “feel”  than other configuration options.  Members also had to get to the widget configurations through a different link than the regular configurations. It wasn’t just me that didn’t like this; more than a few members commented that the widget configuration was difficult to find. Lastly, the original widget configuration page had a menu that included all of a member’s content  and so the menu became noticeably slower as we added features and members added dozens and hundreds item of content.  We found and fixed technical and logic issues in the process.

While the edit content menu was a relatively late change and it caused some of our recent wonkiness in the live Vidlisting version as we migrated and tested the changes, the day or so of pain will be for the best.  The whole process for configuring content has been significantly improved in the next version. You’ll also see significant performance improvements - I ran the current page next to the new page and there is a significant difference. We still have a few days of work dedicated to the edit content menu to finish up but it shouldn’t have much impact on the live version.

This is some of what’s delaying this next release…you deserve real estate video functionality that is smooth and easy. We can’t wait to get this release into your hands.

We have reports that apparently some of our new code isn’t playing well with older content so we are a bit wonky tonight in some key areas.

We’ll have things back stable again after we have a chance to investigate and get things fixed in the morning.

There has been quite of lot of eliminating free levels of service on other real estate video sites.  This chatter likely provides the ideal venue to introduce the levels of service in our next release.

The next release will support 4 levels of service - 3 of them paid. The 2 week demo will support almost all of the features of the first three levels . The levels are as follows:

- Basic Level: This is the free level of service that provides the free basics that you’ll find on other free video sites plus a variety of location services with respect to your videos that you won’t.  You’ll be able to upload videos, photos, and documents as well as make widgets. We’ve rewritten almost all of our basic functionality and made both quality and functionality improvements. You’ll also have a set level of control over what appears in certain functionality such as neighborhoods that you create.  The basic level of functionality will begin after a member’s initial two week demo.

-  Standard Level:  This paid level of service is primarily about functionality.  You’ll be able to do things using the Vidlsiting platform that simply aren’t available on other free sites and even on most paid sites.  While many paid sites simply mimic some Youtube and Facebook features, we’ve really thought about what might add value to your real estate sales and marketing. The standard level of service includes a number of real estate specific services that offer significant improvements over previous Vidlisting versions.

- Advanced Level: This paid level of service is all about personalization of your Vidlisting functionality and the ability to quickly and easily customize your own website using Vidlisting tools as if they were your own. You’ll not only be able to have almost all of the vidlisting features personalized on your own website but you’ll also have granular control over almost everything that is delivered to your customer.  Customers that choose to demo the service before buying will find almost all of the Advanced and Standard level features available to them durong the demo period.  Some customizations will remain permanent for content uploaded during the demo period regardless of whether you choose to become a paying Vidlisting customer. Other customizations made during the demo period will “disappear” if you choose not to become a paying customer but remain in place for some length of time before being erased. this will allow you the opportunity to restore customizations made during your demo for a short  period after your demo period ends.

The Advanced level also has a Advanced Developer option that will make code for many of the Vidlisting platform features available during the demo period and as a value-added option to developers via our growing library of APIs.

- Enterprise level: This paid level of service is about extending a whole set of features to agents and business partners that you actually depend on for business rather than just the normal social network approach of building some group of random followers. As an enterprise member, you’ll be able to share functionality across the members of your enterprise as well as make customization easy for all of your enterprise members regardless of their membership level.  There is a whole lot more that you’ll be able to do with an enterprise account that we’ll detail as we get closer to launch.

The Enterprise level also has an Enterprise Developer add-in that makes almost all of the granular functionality available to and customizable by real estate website developers.While enterprise features won’t be included in the two week member demo, you’ll still be able to join a demo enterprise organization to see exactly how an enterprise works and experience the value-added enterprise features that are available.

Specific functionality and pricing will be covered later.

Once of the big changes in the next release is the amount of real estate oriented data that we’ll provide to your buyers as part of using the Vidlisting platform.  We’re loading huge amounts of data and while we tested with a small subset of the data, some of the rest turned out to be in non-standard formats that our import tools simply don’t like.  This means changing our import tools to accommodate the unexpected formats.  Why? Part of what you’ll see in the next version of Vidlisting includes you being able to upload various types of your own data.  We want your experience uploading various data to be as seamless and error-free as possible. The changes have taken more time than expected.

We are also planning to be at the NAR Convention this year as well as launching various paid levels and services (in adition to free services) with this release that you’ll be able to demo for some time before deciding to buy. This means that we’ll be seeing many of you face-to-face again. Because of those factors, we want to make doubly sure that every piece of functionality works as it should for every level of customers. While we *really* want to release as we are now, we’d prefer to be sure of four things:

1) that we have the “wow” in terms of the functionality unavailable elsewhere

2) that  we have the data coverage that is needed for our customers in various parts of the world

3) that we have the tools to easily make continued improvements to the platform without a lot of rework that may cause future errors

4) that we have the quality and performance that you expect from a world class online service

We are close but not there yet.   We’ll let you know when it’s done.

Our Vidlisting 2010 release has been delayed by two weeks. This pushes our launch schedule out as late as July 15.

We had a pretty serious set of unforeseen performance issues that were bad enough to block our testing of key functionality.  The biggest issue was that our platform data had grown exponentially in the past 6 months due to new functionality and centralized error handling. We also had some logic issues that were not as efficient as they could be.  It took a good 10 days to really find, investigate, and fix all of the things that were blocking our performance goals. The good part is that even though we aren’t making non-emergency code changes to the current Vidlisting site, the performance improvements for vidlisting 2010 have carried over to the existing site as well.

Vidlisting is committed to producing a high quality, functionality packed release. Thanks for bearing with us.

Our underlying FSBL platform has been supporting high definition video (HD) conversion for some time but it has been limited to primarily enterprise customers (read: “organizations”).  We are going to add general support for HD conversion to the Vidlisting 2010 platform. As of this writing, you’ll need to be at least a free Vidlisting member to take advantage of it but we’ll make the final decision as we close in on the launch of Vidlisting 2010.  This new functionality will include the ability to convert HD video from the newest iPhone.  Developers using the API interface into Vidlisting will also be able to take advantage of HD processing.

 We’ve continued the trend of autodetecting as much as possible on upload about your real estate video so that you won’t even need to mark your video as HD. Just upload it - no need to worry about telling the technical details.  The system will automagically detect the video as high definition and process it as such.

We’ll also be adding significant improvements to our support for h.264 video for both upload and viewing.

As part of Vidlisting 2010 which will release shortly, we’ve rewritten our entire video upload and processing code. It still has the nice features such as generating video previews as soon as you upload videos. We’ve made things faster and more efficient while adding a bunch of new functionality primarily for premium and enterprise customers.  I’ll cover the upload changes in more detail as part of my next post.

If you haven’t heard, Vidlisting 2010 is our next release due to go live in June. Though this blog post is focused only on a small feature, VL2010 has a boatload of new features and improvements on old ones. It is tightly focused on improved stability, ease of use, personalization, killer hyperlocal enterprise content management features, and performance. The VL2010 developer API upon which our own platform is built has had portions of the new functionality in use on beta customer websites since late 2009.

Vidlisting has long had the philosophy that your content should be smart in terms of what is around it.  When you upload a video or property listing using Vidlisting, you’ll see that all sorts of information about the area around that video or listing. prior to this release, we’ve been focused at the city or town level.  With the next release, you’ll be able to rock your own customers at the neighborhood level.

Plenty of sites have predefined neighborhoods for you.  Those may work for you or they may be completely off base. At Vidlisting, we think that you are the local expert and should be able to have a role in defining your neighborhoods online. You also shouldn’t have to deal with a “ghost town”or a configuration monster when you create a neighborhood that requires hours of work on your part.

Imagine easily being able to click few spots on a Google map interface to “draw” a neighborhood. Below is a wacky example that took about 10 seconds to create:

Then you can show points of interest, properties for sale, your own real estate videos, and other things that may interest a buyer that exist within the boundaries of what you have drawn.  You can even use that on your own website as part of a whole new level of focus for your business.  A very simple of how you can use Vidlisting to help visualize the neighborhood  might be something like the below:

Again, it’s a wacky example and not even 20% representative of what we’ll be bringing at launch but hopefully it shows the point that I am trying to make. This hand drawn area then becomes “portable”to other places like your own website or to other users i a way that will benefit you.

Depending on your membership level, you’ll be able to “share” previously created neighborhoods with others, filter points that may not be of interest to your own users, add new points such as businesses or listings to the map, and a whole bunch of other things. Best of all, the results of this work can appear within your own website without a single cut and paste.   What you see here is only a taste. We’ve tied a lot of our functionality into this concept of neighborhoods or more technically “definable areas smaller than towns or cities”.

Hyperlocal isn’t really helpful if the system that manages it doesn’t know what is close by and therefore isn’t able to show things around whatever is being shown.  At the city level, we currently have over 20,000 English language town and city descriptions that are cataloged by latitude/longitude.  Add to that, over 900,000 US city and town level real estate marketing reports in English that our platform has collected and catalogued by latitude/longitude.  our 2010 functionality has been tested in a number of different countries and all functionality should work internationally across the 84 countries for which we have data. This means that VL2010 knows what is around whatever is being requested pretty much wherever the system may be used.

That said, we are ready to drill down to the next step with the VL2010 release. We hope to get the similar results at the neighborhood level and be able to deliver tightly targeted real estate friendly content to both users of our platform as well as to developers that want access via code to our growing store of hyperlocal content. The screen captures are from actual beta code.  I hope to release a preview video that demonstrates just how simple this functionality works later this week and much more detail about the powerful things that you’ll able to do with it on your own website.

If you haven’t heard, Vidlisting 2010 is our next release due to release in early June. Though this blog post is focused only on a small feature, VL2010 has a boatload of new features and improvements on old ones. It is tightly focused on improved stability, ease of use, personalization, killer hyperlocal enterprise content management features, and performance. The VL2010 developer API upon which our own platform is built has had portions of the new functionality in use on beta customer websites since late 2009.

As we near launch of the next generation of Vidlisting real estate video services in the next two weeks or so, one big area of focus has been the processing capability of the cluster of servers that we use to convert videos, resize photos on the fly, generate documents, and make custom widgets in real time. We’ve had a few experiences where videos get “stuck” in the system and much of the problem has been self-inflicted in that we didnt initially build the cluster management app in the best possible way to begin with.

The management app asks questions of each server such as: are you ok? are you ready to work? what are you doing?

Initially, the processing system was built in a way that the last answer to these questions would always be valid. We knew it wasnt perfect but being “in a rush” to go live, we stayed with it.   The result was that we occasionally ran into issues where videos were stuck in the system - for example, the management app still believed that a given server was processing a small video days after upload and without any email or warning to the support team.  This was because the processing server had experienced an error that prevented it from making another report to the management app.

Ugg. So, about 18 months ago, I asked the dev that wrote this to fix it and make it more flexible so that the processing machine could better report problems. At that time, we also instituted a way that each processing machine could not only identify/report an error and also “recover” back to a state where it would once again be ready to continue to work without a technician having to manually clear errors.

So, yesterday, as part of the code review for our next release, I was winding through the code of this dev that wrote this functionality but is no longer with our company.  It was a real eye opener. I realized that while the improved system is better, there were still a few opportunities for videos to get “stuck”in the system as it essentially used the same concept as the original bad code.

Our cluster is designed to serve a whole range of customers inside and outside of real estate. I took the time yesterday to completely rewrite the way that this functionality works as a result. The changes will improve both processing and reporting. The support team will be notified as occasional occur and all of the processing information around that error will be stored. The historical data we collect with these changes will help us to continually identify bottlenecks or issues within the processing cluster.

We shouldn’t be hearing “where’s my darn real estate video?!?” anymore once these changes are live.

Many people and organizations don’t know the business advantages of using the Vidlisting platform for their real estate video marketing or content management needs.  We’ll be working to change that with our next release.  This is one in a series of posts that will provide an overview of the existing feature sets at Vidlisting and introduce the concept for the next release in the same functionality area.

This post will focus specifically on geolocation and mapping and how Vidlisting users can create sophisticated maps of their property and points of interest around that property literally in seconds with almost no effort.

THE CURRENT VIDLISTING MAPPING FUNCTIONALITY

Though we’ve had geolocation capability built into our enterprise developer programming interface for almost 2 years, Vidlisting began providing a consumer level of integrated mapping for free and paid users about 6 months ago.  About two weeks ago, we started opening the map pane on the player by default.

Here is what is generated today at the free level for uploaded property videos using the existing version of the Vidlisting platform:

Generating the map involves no extra work other than the normal upload information requirements. The map as it exists today has five components:

1) Town description:  We have a system for automatically generating area descriptions for almost every town in the United States and many foreign locations.

2) Dynamic Map Filter:  The dynamic map filter automatically customizes a list of categories for points of interest around the property.  Rather than overwhelm users with hundreds of points on the map, we start out with 5 basic categories and let the user choose what else they want to see.  The categories are dynamic in that only categories that apply to the property’s area are shown to the user (i.e. if there aren’t any airports locally, the airport category isn’t shown.  The filter does not require a page refresh to show filtered items nor will changing it stop the video that is playing.

3) The Map: There is a large map that shows the property and the filtered points of interest.

4) Local Information: This section presents a wide range of local real estate market reports and other real estate related information specific to the town and area around the property.

5) Content Owner Changes: The member that uploaded the video can make certain changes from directly within the player without having to re-enter the Vidlisting member area.

 THE NEXT VERSION OF VIDLISTING MAPPING FUNCTIONALITY

Our next version of the Vidlisting platform will bring a whole slew of new real estate video and content management capabilities to both the free and paid levels of Vidlisting membership.  We are focusing the mapping areas of this release in the areas of adding new mapping functionality, integrating other existing Vidlisting geolocation services that we’ve been offering for some time, being able to personalize what users see without having to configure the map for every video uploaded, and making the mapping service easier to put on your own website.

We also have added a new set of developer focused capabilities that will let professional and non-professional web developers easily bring a full range of mapping functionality into their customer websites with whatever branding that they choose with a single api call.

So, we have been busy as I’ve mentioned before. Some of the new mapping functionality has been live for a month or so on other partner websites and we’ve been able to respond to feedback and make suggested improvements for launch on Vidisting.  We’ve been using this time with the real estate market down to invest in functionality and platform stability.

2010 will be your year and Vidlisting has the tools to help your success.

We’ve reached a point for development and testing where we’ll need to do an occasional reboot of the vidlisting web server over the next 6 hours or so today Friday 18 Dec.  We apologize for any inconvenience but know that this means that new features are one day closer.

Given the upcoming holidays, it’s better to have the team do this during the day rather than keep them up late tonight or working this weekend.