When I was on Forbes reading this post as part of the myspace-citysearch posts I just wrote, Zillow CEO Rich Barton came up in the Forbes Video network module. I hadn’t seen the video before, so thought the video was new (I was wrong) and wanted to quickly embed it in a blog post straight from that screen. No luck. But thanks to FromCarl for helping me figure the embedding thing out on twitter.

Big news today that Myspace and CitySearch are teaming up to create “myspace local”. I know, I know — you (and I) can’t believe I’m writing about myspace again after my a recent post. But this is big news in the local space. Here is a demo if you’re interested in digging in. Yelp has 20 million UUs and CitySearch only 25 million UUs, even though they have a 10 year head start. So, is this a bit of Yelp envy? Absolutely. However, you’ve got to ask – will this help myspace catch up to facebook in the social networking space? I have to say no on that one since it likely won’t result in many NEW users, which, to me, means its not a partnership that myspace should be spending boatloads of resources on. But, that said, I have no doubt its a partnership that will be lucrative for both parties in the long run (no idea what the rev share deal looks like). Having local business content is a natural starting point for the myspace sales team to tap into that advertiser base. All in all, good move by both companies for striking this deal.

As a side note – I just logged into citysearch with my facebook username and password. Love it. No e-mail confirmation, no captcha, no user name to remember, no hassle. There’s a 98% chance I never would have went to citysearch without their facebook connect integration. But there’s a very low barrier to adding content to their site. Anyone know what the largest sites are that have enabled facebook connect? Do you think it will be a growing trend? What does someone give up strategically by doing that? How does e-mail marketing to those users work?

…are posted over at myKRO. Check em out!

They released a toolbar today….but is there anyone out there who still uses Myspace anymore to care? I’m skeptical the toolbar will get much adoption…but I could be wrong. All I hear about now is Facebook, Facebook, and Facebook some more; for instance, the number of users 35+ in the US has doubled in the last 60 days on FB. I’m just sayin…

I’ll be in LA (more specifically Pasadena) next week for the Los Angeles RE BarCamp (along with David G). I arrive Wednesday afternoon and leave Thursday evening after the barcamp – find me on twitter or e-mail if you’re in the area and want to chat. Especially if you are in the real estate industry, make sure to attend the April 1st happy hour organized by Stacey Harmon!

There are already 460+ RSVPs — if you are interested in sponsoring for $250 (my employer, Zillow, is one of the sponsors), contact Ricardo on Twitter. Should be a fun day and a half with some sun hopefully! Hope to see you there.

There’s a good post over on the Kiva Stories from the Field blog that’s worth reading (IMO) — Are you My Entrepreneur?

Of course the answer is yes…but the real answer is “yes and no”. The degree to which a web company listens to their users is something every website views slightly differently — it’s a fine line between trying to please your users and doing what’s best for your business at the same time. For the most part, those two things align very well; particularly for media companies that make their money from advertising. The more happy users — the more uniques, ad impressions to serve, positive word of mouth, etc. But just because there are a ton of users who revolt over a specific feature or major design change does not mean its bad for your business. Quite the contrary actually (in many, but not all, cases). Look at the facebook newsfeed. Regardless of all the criticism they took, anyone that tells you the feature was a stupid move for their business is clearly not thinking straight or smoking something. Sometimes we forget all these web 2.0 companies are exactly that — companies. As much as we might like to think otherwise, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg, Teachstreet, etc were not created strictly to solve our problems and react to our every demand. They are businesses trying to make money WHILE helping us solve real world problems. If at the end of the day, they can’t pay the bills and build value for their investors, they aren’t going to be around over the long run.

Many users get used to the look and feel of a website and just don’t want to see it change, no matter what the reasoning. Or a specific user may feel that a specific process on a website is clunky and should be reworked. Before spending any development effort, the company has to ask itself: “will spending the development resources to fix or build a particular  feature add anything to the bottom line?” If not, then it’s likely that the work will be put in the queue of work items, but not with any sort of priority. Being on the front lines and constantly interacting with Zillow customers, I naturally always want to help Zillow users get their suggestions and bugs acted on as quickly as possible. But sometimes, there’s just not a business case to be made. A feature that’s only relevant to 1 or 2% of users is probably not worth the development time when you consider other items impacting 90% of users that could be worked on instead. Unfortunately, no web shop has unlimited resources to build and fix everything. Zillow, my employer, is no different in this regard.

Doing a good job of product development prioritization is absolutely critical to any web business that wants to end up on top. I agree with Scoble that Facebook and Zuckerberg are smart to not always listen to their users. Trendsetters and disruptors don’t do what others tell them to do – they find & create their own path regardless of the skeptics and haters. And that’s what Facebook is doing.

I’m up in the mountains this weekend and my friend and I were out building jumps today. When we got in, we went to youtube to see wha tour competition was. These two videos were too good not to share them here.

We videotaped our jumps, but it would take too long to upload them from here so I’ll wait until I get home to put them up.

Congrats to all the websites that made Time’s 50 Best Websites 2008. And I’m particularly happy to see Kiva.org, one of my favorite sites, on the list!!

[via myKRO]

For the microfinance fans in Seattle reading this, don’t forget that Matt Flannery, co-founder of Kiva.org, will be in town at City Hall on March 5th to speak about microfinance and Kiva. If you’re interested in attending, you can buy tickets on Brown Paper Tickets.

Where: Town Hall 1119 Eighth Avenue Seattle, WA 98101

When: 7pm, March 5th (doors open at 6:15pm)

I’m going to disagree that the following point in the Debunking Six Social Media Myths Business Week article is a “myth”:

4. You can do it all in-house. Wrong! You need strategy, contacts, tools, and experience—a combination not generally found in in-house teams, who often reinvent the wheel or use the wrong tools.

It is rare indeed to find an in-house team that can not only conceive and execute a social media campaign but also drive traffic to it with effective e-mail segmentation, search optimization, blogger outreach, blog advertising, Google ads, and more.

Social media can and has been successfully tackled in-house by numerous companies. Make no mistake, it takes resources in the way of headcount, but it can be done. From my point of view, social media done in-house will always be more effective than outsourcing it. It’s pretty simple; social media is all about genuine conversations and relationships. An external social media firm may be able to generate some quick traffic and create a little bit of viral buzz, but they cannot speak for a brand and build long term, valuable relationships with influencers on behalf of a company. Actually working for and representing a brand is important when it comes to social media marketing. If whoever you are talking to knows that you don’t work for the company, they know you have virtually no say with the management team or clout with developers to get things fixed (relevant to web companies) — which means there’s not much you can offer them other than marketing speak.