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. 

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