Sociate

I'm in Abu Dhabi at the Higher Colleges of Technology, participating in the eMerging eLearning conference, courtesy of my friend and neighbor Jay Cross.

Next to me is XPlane's Dave Gray, who just blogged about Jay's post about Macromedia's Ellen Wagner, who just told a story about being blogged during a corporate presentation.

Recursive enough for you?

Paul Rademacher's mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist is elegant and useful, but it's just a start. Excellent that you can see Craigslist houses for rent in the zone you like, within certain price ranges, showing pictures and full listings at the flick of a pinkie. It's a great start.

If you're actually on a househunt, wouldn't it be useful to:

• Annotate the map, listing
• The streets and neighborhoods you really like and those you don't (noted perhaps with your cellphone, while driving)
• Houses you've seen and liked (nixing all those you don't like)
  
• Pertinent details for each place (owner, realtor, square footage, etc.)
• Practical walking or biking radii from public transport, schools and other things you find important
• (add your favorite wish-list item here)
  
• Link your photo stream on Flickr (or the videos on YouTube) with the houses you liked, so you can remember which is which
  
• Build a nice comparison table, mapping the traits you value most against the properties
  
• Have your friends help you find, judge and pick properties (hello, social networking sites!)
  
• Have this all accessible from your cellphone or WiFi PDA
  

A few sites do help find school information, comparable sales prices, crime statistics and other useful information, but I haven't seen the app that focuses on the househunter's process.

Don't wait for REALTORs to bring this to us. They see how powerful the Net is, but somehow, they must think it doesn't serve them to offer customers this much power. More likely, a few Paul Rademachers, hacking away in their pyjamas, will eventually put this together.