Conversations about the MLS industry, creating software, and employee ownership.

I awoke early this morning and decided to peruse my feed reader.  Because I follow quite a few blogs, I usually skim very rapidly over the posts and only pause if something catches my eye.  This morning I was presented with a wealth of interesting posts, each of which I considered posting about but decided instead to post about all of them in one fell swoop:

The One Site to Rule Them All — Rob Hahn asks why agents have blogs separate from their listing search sites.  This caught my eye for two reasons: (1) today several blogging agents/brokers are promoting listing search in every blog post, whereas a year ago they thought the two should be separate; and (2) I’m personally working on re-framing the FBS Blog to include our support and sales sites.

Anatomy of “Connect” — David Recordon (co-inventor and evangelizer of OpenID) asks if 2009 will be the year of “Connect” in social network computing?  Interesting, because I’m seeing more and more real estate people using social networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and am wondering if MLS systems will evolve or if the social part of the MLS will transfer to the social networks.

Computational Mountains — Okay, so the title of the post really is Jeff Dean Keynote at WSDM 2009 but that isn’t what caught my attention.  The truth is I read almost every post from Greg Linden because he tickles my tech fancy.  After reading this post about some of Google’s current exploits, I posted the link on Twitter saying: “For geeks looking for inspiration.”  I also then commented one of Greg Swann’s posts about TED with the same thought.  The sentence from Greg Linden’s post that inspires the Googler in me?  “The amount of processing required is difficult to fathom, yet it seems the kind of computational mountain that might cause others to falter calls out to Googlers.”

Sorry, you can’t be our customer — Seth Godin advocates defining when to say yes to customers and how to say no to non-customers.  This was interesting to me because of our MeTAL initiative this year.  We need to understand our customers perfectly so we know who are customers are not.

Identity Software + Services Roadmap — Kim Cameron from Microsoft is a leader in the evolving world of identity technology (identity helps answer the question “who are you?” on the web and in other software systems) and ponders in this post ” the decline and fall of the ‘closed domain’”.   For relevance to me, see the post above from David Recordon.

Facebook Backtracks and Goes Back to Old ToS (for now) — If you haven’t heard, Facebook recently tried to change its Terms of Service to make clear that the content you upload to Facebook is like an email message you sent to your friends — once they get it, it’s up to your friends to decide what to do with it, not you.  However, the uproar from users was enough to make Facebook retract the new terms of service, for now.  This is relevant to me for a couple of reasons: (1) I think Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has done a good job of managing and communicating with his users about the issue; (2) it seems that terms of service are more important to users than I’ve thought previously; and (3) I think these types of data ownership issues are something MLSs will have to deal with soon.  On this latter point, MLSs have focused well on listing data ownership for years, but the reality is that MLS systems are containing a lot of data beyond listings (such as contacts, emails, and more) and ownership of that data is far less clear than listings.

There, that’s a nice roundup of posts. Maybe one or more of these will germinate into full posts in the coming days.  Which one(s) do you think are most interesting?