Okay, thanks to a code snippet from Mr. Swann and a little file re-naming to get around FeedBurner, the FBS Blog now sports individual RSS feeds for each author. The feed link is right next to the author’s name on each post. The feed in the side panel continues to cover all posts. Personally, I hope everyone continues using the full feed, but I wanted to provide a choice if you just want to follow one of us.
This is my first post to the FBS blog and my name is Steve Schlangen. I’m an 11-year employee of FBS and am an account representative and trainer. I find myself on business travel quite a bit and typically average 70 days per year on the road or “in the airâ€.
I am also trained as a professional pilot and have flown 4900 hours in the General Aviation arena including flight instruction, on-demand charter, air freight, air ambulance and corporate aviation. As well as flying on the airlines to support FBS’s sales and training activities, I occasionally enjoy one of my favorite activities which is to be the pilot-in-command of FBS’s Cessna 340A. The 340A is a twin, piston engine aircraft with a pressurized cabin that has seating for six people and cruises at 190 knots (220 mph) at altitudes as high as 25,000 feet. Here’s a photo of the aircraft which is registered with the FAA as N340WJ (“November 3, 4, 0, Whiskey, Juliet†in aviation-speak).
FBS owns the plane with another Fargo company with each company having a 50% share. Fixed costs (P&I payments, hangar expense, insurance and recurrent pilot training fees) are split 50-50 by the partnership. Direct operating costs (fuel and maintenance) are covered by each company proportionally to the number of hours flown each month.
FBS uses the Cessna 340A in two primary roles. The first is when there is a customer or prospective client meeting within three hours flying time of Fargo. The 3-hour rule of thumb allows for FBS employee-owners to fly to the destination, drive to the meeting place, conduct the business at hand, drive back to the airport and fly home in time to sleep in our own beds that night.
The second typical use of the aircraft is to support travel within a region of the country where FBS intends to saturate its efforts for a few consecutive days. In this way, it is possible to provide followup training classes for existing MLS customers in multiple locations and to provide one or more flexmls system demonstrations to prospective MLS customers in that same region. One exceptionally productive trip had myself and two other employee-owners traveling to Texas in N340WJ with stops in Iowa and South Dakota on the way home to Fargo. We left on Monday morning and returned home Thursday evening after having conducted six product demonstrations and four recurrent flexmls training classes.
FBS’s use of General Aviation aircraft provides the following operational advantages:
N340WJ is a very good business tool for FBS. It provides our company with an alternative to airline travel when cost or travel time benefits favor its use. I enjoy the challenge and adventure that comes with flying N340WJ for FBS and I’ll share some of those adventures in future posts!
Even though I was very pleased the FBS Blog was referenced by Joel Burslem as one of the single author blogs he reads, the truth is that the FBS Blog has always been intended to be a multi-author blog with many of FBS’s employee owners contributing. To date, Greg Kilwein and I have been the only two authors, but I’m now pleased to also introduce Steve Schlangen.
Steve brings many talents to FBS, including being our pilot, a lead account executive and a trainer. Steve was hired by FBS over a decade ago to run a charter operation we had then, but, as fate would have it, we needed Steve to get into MLS sales and so he did — very well. Steve has been a key to our rapid growth over the last seven or eight years and I’m excited that he’ll be writing for the FBS Blog.
Steve will be covering several areas for us, with his first post focused on his passion of flying. Steve also is planning a series of posts highlighting some of the interesting things our international customers are doing with flexmls Web. I suspect we’ll also get regaled occasionally with posts from the road, as Steve travels quite a bit for FBS both as pilot and account executive.
Please welcome Steve and I hope you enjoy his posts.
P.S. Following Greg’s path, I’ll be working on adding individual author feeds for those who just want to follow certain FBS Blog authors.
I was envious today as I read Marc Davison’s description of a recent Keller Williams think tank meeting. I’ve been impressed with Gary Keller ever since I read his book outlining the process he found successful for real estate sales and turned it into the Keller Williams franchise. I would loved to have participated with this group, yet we’ve been so focused on our MLS clients that we haven’t reached out to the franchises separate from our MLS efforts. As I watch Trulia and Zillow court the franchises hard and fast, I have to wonder if we’ve been making a mistake by not having stronger relationships with the franchises.
At the same time, Jim Duncan writes today that the power center may be shifting to agents, something I’ve long thought. On the other hand, Kris Berg says that size does matter when selecting a broker and that bigger is better. Along that same line of thinking, my friends over at eNeighborhoods have long established relationships with the franchise systems, and, as is often the case with them, that’s starting to look smarter and smarter.
I’ll conclude this post by circling back to the Keller Williams meeting for a second, and contrasting that with one of the key MLS meetings, called Connection, which has now purposely excluded vendors from their discussions. This is a mistake. MLSs need to engage with vendors now more than ever. We need to be having high-level discussions about the future of MLS and the real estate sales process.
I suspect the MLSs feel the vendors will try to sell them something or otherwise prevent them from speaking freely. I can only speak for myself, but my primary motivation in attending these conferences is to participate in the discussions. I no more want to cart a booth or projector or brochures to these meetings than the man on the moon. I want to come with my mind only and engage on the issues and seek better answers together. Keller Williams is inviting Trulia to their event and Google is invited to Connection, which leaves me wondering even more where we should be focusing our attention.
I was cruising through some posts over at REliberation, a blogging platform from Point2, and ran across a post that asked, “Why do you blog on REliberation?” Looking through the many comments, the one that stood out for me was this one:
I enjoy the social interaction with like-minded professionals with whom I do not compete.
The emphasis added is mine, because I think it goes to the heart of the matter. Blogging networks like ActiveRain, etc., most often seem to involve non-competitors, whereas the MLS is a platform for allowing competitors to cooperate.
For certain, the MLS is a social network, but it is one with a limited purpose (exchanging listing information) and what should be a narrow set of rules to enable that on a broad scale to capture all the information in the relevant market. Do you think the MLS is the place for social networking beyond this limited purpose? Or, like the commenter above, would you prefer to network with non-competitors outside the MLS?
Twenty years from now we will look back at this period of the early twenty-first century as a critical turning point in economic and social history. We will understand that we entered a new age, one based on new principles, worldviews, and business models where the nature of the game changed.
– Wikinomics by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
The other day, I was cooking dinner and my kids were watching Hannah Montana or Suite Life or some other Disney show on the computer in our kitchen. I asked them why they were watching on the computer with a relatively small screen when they could watch it on the bigger television. Without hesitation, they responded, “because we get to choose the episode we want to watch.” That’s what the web is instilling in our lives in ever new ways: choice, individual choice, control, freedom, creativity, joy.
Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams have it right, this is a special time in history and we’re privileged to be living and participating in it. I think it’s sort of like watching people like Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods at the top of their game; you know that you’re witnessing something special. Even more so, though, the revolution of the web involves us all individually and gives us an opportunity to participate in the revolution. We’re not just on the sidelines or the bleachers watching greatness, we’re a part of it. Every day, I’m thrilled with the possibilities, because I know we’re living history.
I treasure the thought that I’ll be cooking dinner again years from now, with my grandkids nearby, and they’ll be doing something that today would seem unfathomable, but it will have everything to do with the web. I’ll then be able to enthrall (or bore) them with a story that starts, “I remember when . . .”
Prologue: This post may be about me being too close to the subject at hand to see clearly. Or it may be about how concise writing can draw you into my morass. But I’m hoping it’s about the power of blogging, and how your wisdom will lead to a better answer to my questions.
The print and e-mail functions in question are in the menu in the upper right corner, which, closer up, looks like this, along with the main content tabs of the application:
That menu looks pretty straight-forward, right? For the most part, it is:
The challenge is that a lot of our users want to e-mail the 2D or print version of the content. So, while E-mail and Print seem very easy and clear at first, where we’ve messed up is that most people think of E-mail and Print as verbs or actions but, to some extent, we’re using them as nouns or even adjectives to describe the content, e.g., the “e-mail” version and “print” version. It is counter-intuitive to have to explain to someone that you go to the Print function to e-mail a report.
Because of this morphing of the language we’ve managed, we’re now toying around with either moving the “e-mail” part of the “print” function to exist under E-mail or changing the Print and E-mail menu items themselves to be more descriptive of the content and less “verb” or “action” oriented. The challenge with either of these approaches is that we need to come up with a one (maybe two) word description for the different versions of the output. One of the best examples we’ve come up with is Brochure to describe the print version, but we’ve really struggled with what to call the E-mail or 3D version. Words like “application” or “portal” come to mind but aren’t very good. We’re providing a “link” to the application, which could be called a client portal (or, as our friends at Marketlinx call it, a Client Gateway), but do those words truly capture what is happening and become easily understood to the user? Will they know what a portal or gateway are? Which is better, portal or gateway or something else?
This confusion leads me back to the beginning, and possibly using a verb other than e-mail, to try to avoid the confusion. Instead of e-mail, I wonder if “Share” would work as a menu item. The concept of “sharing” has become popular recently because of its use on video sites like YouTube, and it applies well to the context — I’m sharing whatever is on this page. Also, I like “share” because it allows us a place on the menu to more easily add ways to share the content other than e-mail, without cluttering up the menu. So, perhaps we go with Share and Brochure or even Share and Print, because the fact that you can e-mail the print version isn’t as confusing if E-mail isn’t on the main menu.
What do you think? Are we delirious from these issues so near release and should we just forget it and leave the menu E-mail and Print? Should we move the function to e-mail the print version under the e-mail menu item? Or should we go with something like Share and Brochure for menu items?
Is this the next killer listing tour? These images are produced by a regular digital camera attached to a robotic arm called Gigapan that automatically moves and zooms the camera as it is taking many, many pictures. Software then stitches the photos together and tiles them to allow for a very smooth and immersive browser experience. The focus for Gigapan seems to be outdoor panoramas right now, and the results are stunning, but I think this basic approach will take off in real estate, too.
Facebook is the darling of nearly everyone, it seems, especially after the site “opened up” to allow outsiders to develop software for use inside Facebook. Notice especially that last phrase, though, “inside Facebook.” The idea is that Facebook has all these people (you, me, etc.) adding personal data to the site, making friends, poking each other, etc., and all that data about us (what Facebook likes to call the “social graph”) is Facebook’s; it’s on their servers and it’s their “platform” to be made available to others as long as you’re on Facebook.
Recently, however, some pretty prominent companies and developers have been calling for “opening up the social graph” and giving users control over their data instead of having it stuck in Facebook’s silo. (I like silo better than platform; it seems more descriptive somehow.) For example, just last week, Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and David Recordon (SixApart) gave a speech at O’Reilly’s Web2Summit about their efforts to create social network portability. Brad and David also are co-creators of OpenID, which aims to be “a free and easy way [for people] to use a single identity across the Internet.”
This speech followed Brad Fitzpatrick’s post a few months ago on the same topic, not long before or after which, Brad joined Google. And not long after that, Google announced that on November 5 (just a few weeks away now) it would be making a major announcement regarding Google’s plans for social networking, i.e., competing with Facebook. The basic idea is that, whereas Facebook is a silo for your data, Google is expected to create a way for you to control your data and make it transportable to other networks more easily.
At the same Web2Summit last week, Jeff Huber from Google was quoted on TechCrunch, in the post “The Web Is The Platform”, as proclaiming:
What we see is applications fundamentally changing. Just like the model for content changed from monolithic sites, now applications are going to be feeds and containers. A lot that you have heard here is about platforms and who is going to win. That is Paleolithic thinking. The Web has already won. The web is the Platform. So let’s go build the programmable Web.
A good question at this point is how this relates to MLS? In two ways: (1) Facebook, despite being the darling of the web today, is a data silo, just like MLS systems are accused of being; and (2) the future of data management and control is changing significantly, right now. Let me state these points again, differently, because I think they are important.
First, I’m speaking for myself here, but I think MLSs and MLS vendors are too defensive and too used to outsider carping about how backward and old-school and far-removed from the openness of the web they and their clients supposedly are. That’s just not true, and we only need to look at the Facebook silo, the darling of the web, for proof. If anything, MLSs are far ahead of Facebook in terms of web technology, because MLSs have a pretty well established API for retrieving data from the MLS system.
Second, the future of MLS today is being debated on whether to centralize data collections or not, with the strong move being towards centralization. Yet Google’s work in social networking portability is pointing the way toward decentralized data collections, using the “web as the platform.” What does that mean, exactly? It means people follow standard ways to create their data (in the case of real estate listings, hopefully RETS) and then also provide a standard way for others to access and interact with it, all of which means the creators retain control of their own data, which is very much at the heart of the debates in MLS today.
I’ve written before that I believe one of the single most important steps NAR could and should take to benefit their members would be to develop a leadership position around a national or worldwide property identification system based on web addresses. I can’t claim to have the technical skill to have thought through this every step of the way, but my basic idea is the same as what Google and SixApart and others are saying about the web being the platform. More data is being created today by more people than ever before. You can have all the silos you want, but the reality is that the full data about any thing is going to be distributed everywhere. What’s much more important than trying to silo data is trying to link data, and that’s why I think it’s so important to develop an easy and concrete method of identifying properties, so that all the disparate data can be linked together.
The great appeal of this approach is that it’s relatively easy technologically (any URL will do) and just requires popularity (prevalent use) to make it successful. (Importantly, it may also require, at least transitionally, a central repository to establish the identity.) That’s where NAR can help by coordinating with county governments and recorders and title companies to develop consensus around a new microformat for identifying properties. With such a basic piece in place, so much more can be built on top of it without having silos. Or put differently, creating many and more comprehensive and even competitive silos will be made easier because there will be a uniform way to tie together the data.
Is this idea too far out? Is it crazy? Or is Google just spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt in Facebook’s direction to try to lower their valuation so Google can acquire them? Maybe. Yet the same concepts have been articulated by two Yahoo! researchers as well in a paper called Toward A PeopleWeb (unfortunately, a pay site, unless you’re an IEEE member). The abstract of the article says it with techno-speak but well enough:
Important properties of users and objects will move from being tied to individual Web sites to being globally available. The conjunction of a global object model with portable user context will lead to a richer content structure and introduce significant shifts in online communities and information discovery.
In English, no silos. In the paper, the writers state that, with a global object model, “Users will be able to reference broad range of objects from anywhere on the Web, and they will do so based on a common identity for both objects and individuals.”
RETS is one part of defining this global object model and a key to that is a common identity. Other efforts on other “objects” are happening all over the world. This is what I was writing about in The Future of MLS Is Now. Just like other industries and social concerns, the real estate industry is being modeled for the web. This is happening now, it hasn’t run past us. Yet.
Re-reading my post this morning Are Competitive MLSs Possible or Desireable?, I feel like the end of the post lacked some clarity. The real question is whether broad standards can be achieved without creating huge MLSs or one MLS, which is likely to destroy the conversations that make the MLS valuable in the first instance. This is all about preserving the intimacy of the social connections inherent in the MLS while at the same time fostering broad agreements of cooperation on a national basis.
To understand this point, step back and consider the history and future of the MLS through the eyes of Joe and his progeny:
“Hey, Joe, I hear the Smith place is up for sale.”
“Yep, know anyone who might be interested?”
“Maybe.”
“I’ve been trying to get that place sold for awhile. If you bring me a buyer, I’ll split my commission with you.”
“Deal.”
“Joe, this is Mary from our office, she’s got a few listings, too.”
“Great, I brought Ann, who’s been working with lots of buyers lately.”
Mary says, “I couldn’t sleep last night so I wrote down all of our listings on these recipe cards and organized them in this shoe box. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Awesome, can I copy those?”
“Sure, if you I can copy yours.”
“No problem.”
“Hey, I ran into Peter at the Print Shop the other day, and he saw my shoe box and said he could print them up in a book for us if we want.”
“That sounds great!”
“Joe, have you seen these new computers some of the folks are using?”
“Yeah, those are pretty handy. But man, who’s in charge of that anyway? I hardly know anyone involved in this any more.”
“I’m working on a web site to show all the listings in the MLS system.”
“You’re what? Are you sure you can do that? Will the MLS allow it?”
“Hey, I’m doing it. I don’t care about those idiots at the MLS; they’re all old school, just trying to protect their turf!”
“Joe III is sick of the stoopid rules of the national MLS and so has created a Real Estate Sharing Group for like-minded people.”
“Joe III is holding a meetup at Starbucks for RESG, see you there!”
“Hey, Joe, I hear the Smith place is for sale . . . “
