Take for instance, zillow.com — the slick and impressive service that will serve you up a google map view of homes in the area you are interested in, and give you an approximation of the value of the homes in that area.  Now how is a consumer, or a seller for that matter, supossed to use this information?   I found the unique interface, and use of google maps very compelling — lending the service some sort of credibilty… until I searched in my own neighborhood.  The values weren’t even close… it’s as if the data for the neighborhood is over a year old.  Surprise, zillow can offer you what every other home valuation service has offered over the years — out of date and irrellevant home values. 

 The real estate market is driven by many factors, and I have yet to find any online service that can properly value a specific home.  To be clear, each offers valuable information that you can use in your overall research (schools, flood info, trends, comps), but folks like Zillow are dangerous from my perspective because they try to actually proclaim specific individual home values.  In my neighborhood, zillow was consistently 20-40% off on a home by home basis.

 Take Trulia.com, far less presumptous than Zillow — but still offering out of date pricing information.   It does offer you current listings, but unless there are lots of homes on the market in a particular neighborhood, it becomes difficult to assess those prices.  The collection of information *is* valuable, but when making a purchase of this size — you have to pound the pavement as well as the internet.

I just imagine a midwest couple who just got a great job offer in the SF Bay Area looking up Los Gatos neighborhood based on schools, and commute.  They would go to zillow.com, and in looking at a neighborhood they know nothing about, figure that they could buy a decent 3bedroom home in the Los Gatos school district for 800 or 900k. 

Think again… you would be lucky to find a lot for under 1.2m (recently a lot with a teardown sold for 1.2M) — yet, on zillow that same lot showed for about 800k.

Conclusion… BUYER BEWARE.  These services do offer some great information, and in the hands of a well-informed and skeptical user, very valuable.  However, when these services move from beyond information, to “proclamation” as in the case with Zillow, a skeptic might say they are bordering on deception. 

Here is some great shots of some of the action this past weekend at the Infineon race.  Unfortunately, there were several injuries that day — probably the worst day I've seen ever in my short experience.  I think everyone will be OK tho, mostly folks shaken/beat up, and one broken leg.

Here is what happens when one tries to "invent" a hole that just doesn't exist.

We have had 2 local club races at this point.  First race was in the rain, which was fun, except I had motor problems*.  Second race was this past weekend, and it was a doozy!  My kart was the fastest of the field, and should have had the win, except that I blew a head gasket**.  I ended up 5th.  It was fun running at the top of the field, and spent most of the race attached to the leader's bumper.. .until.. well…. uh.  Let's just say that I learned alot!  Don't get greedy!

The big race of the year was the Kartsport grand prix.   http://www.kartsportgrandprix.com/  The best drivers from all over show up for a special 3 class race – yep, only 3 classes, the best of the best.  Well… let's just say they also let in some local "fodder" such as myself to help fund the $15k purse.  I learned a ton watching these guys SmOkE me on the track!  My kart was in top form, handling great, strong power… but they just were outdriving me about a tenth per corner.  That adds up to a whopping 1.2 seconds/lap, which at an average of about 60mph sets you back pretty quickly.  That said, I improved quite a bit over the course of the weekend, which served me well going into my next race.   Like I said, in my last club race I was poised to win… so now I have to learn about not being an idiot on the last lap.

 All my races have been at Infineon raceway on the kart track.  See some pics below of the action!

*motor problems = catch phrase for driver who makes stupid fuel mixture adjustments during the race and messes up the tuning of the motor.  I got totally lost on my low speed fuel mixture, and the kart was dead in the mid-RPM range.

**head gasket = another way to refer to the driver's brain.  Blowing a head gasket = driver is an idiot.

Well, 20 million users later, 80% marketshare, and never missing a ship date, where was he now?  Certainly our success was not a condemntation of OOP, afterall OOP is the standard today, however — it was a demonstration of how to make technical decisions — DO WHAT MAKES SENSE.  Implementation tradeoffs need to be driven by objectives, which typically are USER and BUSINESS objectives — technical purity should only be a means to an end. 

The fun continued… next we needed to build a system in which we could deliver data and information to both our new web community (quicken.com), and our client code.  We designed a very rudimentary HTTP based system which included a “data server” (stock quotes, etc.), and well defined request methods using tag-value pairs in HTTP.  I was ASSURED that if we did not rewrite our system using DCOM (the future of the world) we would live to regret it… we would not benefit from re-use, we would not benefit from security protections, and what we were doing was “just all wrong”, our HTTP interfaces did not self-describe (a big topic of the SOA crowd).  Well, it turns out, we not only built a tremendously successful and leveraged set of HTTP based web services, but did it in a fraction of the time it would have taken to use DCOM.  Those services are still in operation today (as far as I know) — and were easily migrated to new platforms — the HTTP standard just kept working.  DCOM would have been a major headache.   Yes, we didn’t self-describe, so we couldn’t just open our service to the world so other machines could figure it out and use it.  We did make a lot of money though.

What is the lesson for the SOA crowd?  Make your Service Oriented Architecture a USER Oriented Architecture — make it WORK for the problem at hand.  Big enterprise applications will still make sense going forward, don’t try to break all your apps into little modules just for the sake of it – but where it is appropriate to abstract concepts to services (identification, data services, directory services, etc.), then SOA makes sense.

Again… just like with OOP, we get it guys… we get what the world COULD be like if we could just “be there” with a world of interconnected services.  I don’t doubt we will get there someday… but for those who are trying to build businesses, manage internal infrastructure, and ship products today…

just do what makes sense.

I used to battle the PC crowd, trying to leverage (as engineers do) the logic of intentions.  Often, one might inadvertantly “offend” someone when in fact the intentions were the complete opposite.  I always tend to judge others behavior towards me based on their intentions, and offer graciousness and kindness even when their best intentions might cause them to gaff.  I couldn’t understand why the PC movement could not understand this.

Now I do.  It is not about truth, nor is it about intentions.  It’s about power.  You see, when one cannot win in the battleground of ideas, and they sense a threat to their power, they find a way.  PC is just another tool in the world of the subjective that can be used to demonize an individual regardless of their intentions, or capabilities.

What is really sad is typically, it is the intolerant, unforgiving, and judgmental that use this tool… and typically it is those who are truly tolerant and inclusive that end up being the victim of PC intolerance.

Once again we are caught in a flurry of new software and web services that are all about “what you can do”, not “what they can do”.  When will they learn?  When we brought Quicken to market (yes, many years ago), there were 44 financial management products already on the market.  Why add just another one to the fray?  Well, Quicken was the first of those products that was built from listening to the target customer first, understanding their pain, and offering a solution that was not about “if you are willing to do the work, here is what you can get”.  It was built for the user who is not interested in “doing the work”, that is the whole purpose of automation!!

It is no different with web services — what we call “blogging” and “social networking” today is really about a universal need and desire to stay in touch with those you care about.  Oh yes, for the few (Mr. Scoble), it is about a platform for expressing oneself and gaining notoriety, but nobody is going to make it in the long run with tools for Mr Scoble and friends.  It is about the unwashed masses, the 50 million in the U.S., hundreds of millions internationally, that are not going to spend time trying to maintain a website (no matter how easy Vista tries to make it).  They just want to keep up with each other, and want it to come easily, automatically, and ideally, as an unintended consequence of their actions today. 

My wife knows nothing about social networking.  She does not see the web as anything but a utility — email, maps, information, commerce — it has nothing to do with “cool”, and everything to do with “life”.  She downloads photos for printing, pure utility.  She reads email, because it is an essential function for life today.  She is on the internet at least 5 hours a week.  That is 5 hours interacting with a BROWSER, 5 hours of opportunity.   Who is going to “fill in the blanks” for her? 

Oh yes, she desires what Web 2.0 could do for her — but that’s the whole point, will it “do it for her?”

Not today. 

Will Web2.0 learn the lesson that was taught by iTunes and Palm?  Until services can be simplified, messaged, and purpose built (vertical) for the mass audience, they will do no more than serve the clique that they serve today.

Those Web2.0 neocons that are actively using undocumented services like del.icio.us, and others, take such pride in knowing all the 2.0 acronyms and terminology.  They revel with each other on self glorifying forums purpose built for those who need to be “different” from the mass population.  Afterall, they “get it”.

Well… “getting it”, in my view, is when you get the cash.  Palm and iTunes did that by building the devices and services for the mass of the population that doesn’t “get it”.  You see, when you can reach those who don’t “get it”, that’s when you really “get it”.

Go get some!

Example: 1. Open the Tools menu and choose Shelf. 2. Drag interesting URLs, pictures or text snippets from any web page onto the shelf. 3. Click the Blog Editor icon (that looks like a feather pen). 4. Drag items from the Shelf into your blog post.

Flock

 Yeah.. it would be nice if there were actually a “shelf” menu item under Tools.  Okay, it’s pre-beta