I want to try and explain what social bookmarking is and then tell you about how we are planning on giving it a real estate twist with our new web application Dwellicious.

In my previous post I recommended you take a look at this video.  It does a great job of describing social bookmarking "in plain English".  But I’ll also try and explain what social bookmarking is here.

Lets imagine you are interested in motorcycles.  You love motorcycles.  You "ride to live and live to ride motorcycles", as the saying goes.  As part of your passion for motorcycles you scour the web for the best motorcycle websites out there.  The best ones you "bookmark", but since you are using a social bookmarking service instead of just "add to favorites" on your own browser, your bookmark is shared with everyone using the service.

Now lets say another kindred spirit, who also loves motorcycles, visits the social bookmarking site you belong to.  He types in "motorcycles".  Now all the bookmarks that other motorcycle junkies (like you) have made show up, the motorcycle websites with the most bookmarks are on the top of the list.  This is quite powerful.  What you have in front of you is a list that other humans beings put together about the best websites about motorcycles.  Think about that, OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, not a computer, not an advertiser that paid to be on top, not a fancy mathematical program, other REAL PEOPLE who love the same things you do!

With Dwellicious we want to bring the power of this concept to real estate.  There are two challenges when it comes to creating a social bookmarking service to real estate.

1.  People are mostly interested in the listings themselves, not just the website.

2.  Listing information tends to change (Price, status, adding new photos, etc.)

So we needed to create bookmarks that could grab data about a particular listing on a website.  And we needed to make sure that the bookmark knew if any of the changes were made and when.  In a traditional bookmarking scenario you are just bookmarking a site because it's cool, useful, and you want to visit again.  But when you bookmark a real estate listing, that listing might not be there next week or the price might have dropped.  What we needed was a "smart bookmark" and that's what we created.
 

More next week...

Please visit Dwellicious to help us pick a logo.

We are also looking for beta testers, contact me at greg@woolleyrobertson.com if you are interested.