Sure, you can revolutionize the real estate market by doing a mashup of data and maps to create a nifty tool that lets anyone find the market value (or a market value, anyway) of homes across the land.
Agents? We don't need no stinking agents, do we? "There's just one thing left," Jeff Jarvis says -- "scheduling visits and accompanying the buyers."
But hold on a quick second with that revolution -- before any of this can happen, your nifty, agent-disintermediating tool has to work.
Right now Zillow's site has a big red notice that says "Site seems slow? Close your eyes and envision your perfect home -- by then maybe the server can handle our zillions of visitors."
The thing is, the site isn't slow, it's non-functional, as far as I can tell, a good two days after its unveiling. Every single search I've tried has resulted in a "We're sorry. We encountered a problem performing this search" message.
Launching a complex new service isn't easy, to be sure. Bt I'd have thought Zillow's team would have known that every single home-owner within earshot of their URL would be pounding on their site the moment it went live (that's in addition to all of the Web 2.0 geeks and the real estate pros).
Well, it may not work -- but at least it's still free!
UPDATE: Nick Carr, at least, appears to have gotten Zillow to work -- but he doesn't like the quality of the data he found there.
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