In a couple of weeks, we have the honor of speaking at  the "Pump Up the Volume with Widgets, Blidgets and Other Doo-Dads" session in San Francisco at Blogger's Connect.  As a preview, we wanted to share a Featured Blog that is running on Realivent's hosted solution fully equipped with lead generation widgets, home valuation forms, and other cool doodads that keeps the site useful and interactive.  The Keller Williams Smart Legacy Group ( www.smartlegacy.com )  has done an impressive job growing the site's readership since its recent launch (Even Pete Flint of Trulia  stopped by) and hope to see it generate lots of business with these tools.  Content is king, but lead generation widgets convert!  We won't go into the details of how each of these work because we'll save it for our talk, but just wanted to point out some of the neat features that currently exist.

Customized Header:

Zillow CMA Widget

Featured Listing Widget

Mortgage Calculator Widget

Property Watch Widget

There are many, many more doodads on this site to mention and we'll talk about them in more detail in a couple of weeks.  In the meantime, if you need any of these tools for your site, you can download them here.  Enjoy!

Popularity: 39% [?]

As we talked about before, the iPhone could be the next hit gadget   to invade Realtor's wallets over the next few years.  This is becoming more apparent as more and more applications are being developed at an unprecedented pace.  UI intense applications are going to catapult the iPhone into a mainstream social media device that you would not want to be without.  One of the future applications that will be launching is FLICKIM, a mobile Instant Messaging application that will allow you to chat with multiple parties simultaneously.  Not only that, YouTube videos can be sent through the chat service and streamed right on their iPhones.   Tech Crunch said that the application was developed within a week.   Wow!  If this can be developed within a week, I just can't imagine the applications that will be coming with more resources and developers dedicated to this new platform.

IM applications are on the rise and being heavily adopted on real estate websites and blogs.  Lots of Realtor sites are now embedded with Meebo, Plugoo, and Yahoo IM widgets, but 90% of them are always offline.  Why ?  Because agents are always on the go! They can't be sitting in front of their computer when they should be out in the field prospecting, building referral networks, and selling houses.  So why have an IM widget when you're not online even half the time ?  Well the iPhone and these new mobile IM apps may very well solve these problems.  I have mulitple Meebo , Yahoo and AIM accounts myself but once I'm away from the computer, all of these accounts are pretty much dead without a live connection. I've been looking for an easy Treo 650 app for a long time, but the services are clunky and very slow.  If FlickIM is as fast as it sounds, this may be one of the many applications that will drive greater adoption of instant communication widgets on blogs in the future.  Can't wait until it launches to find out.

Popularity: 40% [?]

Zillow has again released more updates and features to its website.  This time they mean serious business vying to own the neighborhood talk of the week.  And of course the news is already starting to Zizzle around the blogoshere with comments abounding everywhere including:

Bloodhound Blog , Drew Myers Insights , Inman News just to name a few.

Among the new offerings are:

Neighborhood Pages

Discussions

and Personalized Home Page

A quick look at the structure of the neighborhood pages shows great promise.  With neighborhood demographics, # of neighbors, discussion, bulletin boards and of course real estate stats , the community is setup very nicely for a lot of interaction.  There has been a number of companies who have tried many of these concepts this year including StreetAdvisor , YourStreet (which has closed its doors temporarily for a relaunch) , and Fatdoor.com and none have shown ridiculous viral growth as we've seen in other Web 2.0 social networks. 

One reason for the lackluster performance in real estate social networks is that consumers do not have a dying desire to discuss real estate all day long unless they are in the market to buy or sell a house (I'd be curious to know at any given point in time what percentage of Americans are in the market to buy or sell ?)   On the other hand social networks such as Yelp allows the community to discuss everything from resturants, to shopping, to entertainment, and while they are doing all that maybe the subject of buying or selling will come up in their conversations.  But Zillow may have opened up their Discussions section just enough to get more neighbors "ranting and raving" about something that will grow into a more connected network beyond real estate.  They also have a bulletin board section which allows neighbors to post garage sales, local events and town meetings.

Trulia Voices is growing at a steady pace with its new Q&A offering and Redfin has recently launched a forum dedicated to real estate talk.    Although it's too early to make any predictions, it doesn't look like any of these new social networks will be going away anytime soon and with Zillow now in the mix, it might just be enough to help consumers adopt these trends sooner rather than later. 

Popularity: 36% [?]