VL2010 New Release Functionality Preview #1: Bringing It To The Neighborhood!
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.