Redfin is on the hunt to find the most iconic homes that are currently on sale in America and we need your help! Know of a home that can be considered iconic? Whether it is a houseboat in Seattle, a classic Tudor in Chicago, or a Colonial in Boston, we’d like to invite you to nominate homes you believe are worthy of this title, in any or all of our 19 cities. Nominate a home today, it’s really simple.

How It Works:

• Nominate a home one of three ways:

1. Post a comment to this blog that includes the home’s address or a link to the home’s active listing on Redfin.com.
2. Follow us on Twitter (www.twitter.com/redfin), then Tweet a link to the home’s Redfin.com listing. Be sure to include #iconichomes and @redfin (Sample Tweet: @Redfin I nominate http://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/3254-Portage-Bay-Pl-E-98102/home/40085752 for #iconichomes).
3. Like Redfin on Facebook (www.facebook.com/redfin), then post a comment on the wall with the home’s address or link to its Redfin.com listing. Be sure to mention “Iconic Homes” and include this link: http://bit.ly/SQluZw (Sample Facebook post: I nominate http://www.redfin.com/WA/Seattle/3254-Portage-Bay-Pl-E-98102/home/40085752 for Seattle’s Most Iconic Home! http://bit.ly/SQluZw).

• Starting on October 22, we will comb through all the nominations and select the most iconic homes for each city.
• From October 26 to November 2, the public votes for their favorites on Facebook.
• A winning home from each city will be announced on November 5. What’s the prize? Major bragging rights and hopefully lots of media attention.

Some things to consider when submitting a home:

1. Cool and unique architecture.
2. Stylish and beautifully decorated.
3. Representative of the city’s style.
4. Famous. Think Sleepless in Seattle, Clueless (Los Angeles), Full House (San Francisco), Home Alone (Chicago).
5. Wildly different from the other homes on the block.
6. Your favorite memories of childhood, college, or whenever.

Contest Timeline:

• October 16 – 21, 2012 – Nomination Period
• October 22 – 23, 2012 – Finalist Selection Period
• October 26 – November 2, 2012 – Voting period hosted on our Facebook page (www.facebook.com/redfin)
• November 5, 2012 – Winner announcement!

If you have any questions let us know. Let the nominations begin!

The post Redfin’s Iconic Homes of America Competition – Nominate a Home Today! appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

In fact, someone over at Google must feel like the coach of Cuba’s national baseball team. Of the 2,174 current Facebook employees with a LinkedIn profile, 378 cited Google in their work history, or nearly 1 in 5.  What’s remarkable about their decision isn’t the aplomb of Facebook recruiting, but the lack of imagination of Facebook’s Google recruits.

What’s the point of leaving one unassailable Internet platform where all your friends work for another unassailable Internet platform where all your friends work? It’s like getting a divorce to marry your wife’s sister.

I know, because I’ve been the wife in that situation before. When a colleague at a startup joined a competitor, my old partner Kirill Sheynkman had a very different reaction from mine. The colleague’s defection seemed shockingly traitorous to me but to Kirill, it was much worse: it was boring.

“You spend years working on database query tools, only to say ‘I’m sick of it, I quit’ and join a database query tools company,” Kirill said. “Where’s the imagination?” Forget the banality of evil, what galled Kirill was the evil of banality.

To someone at Google, perhaps the choice doesn’t seem banal because the two companies seem different: Google has its own dance studio, whereas Facebook only washes employee’s clothes. Google wants to become a dominant social network, and Facebook already is a dominant social network.  But to someone at a true startup, the two kind of look the same. Both will succeed without you.

Of course, Facebook is one of the few truly great Internet companies, and it’s easy to understand why anyone would want to work there. But if you’re going to leave the security of the world’s greatest software company, why not leave to try something hard, something raw, something completely different? A successful run at Google is the Silicon Valley equivalent of diplomatic immunity in Lethal Weapon 2:  every venture capitalist wants to give you money and any startup wants to hire you.

You could help someone who actually needs it, you could do something that hasn’t been done before. If you fail, you won’t be poor, and you won’t be unemployed long. I’ve heard Facebook is hiring.

(Update: some folks at Facebook have taken me to task for the tongue-in-cheek headline calling out their creativity. I’m sorry. I hadn’t meant that seriously. The people moving between Google and Facebook are obviously the gods of Silicon Valley, people who belong on bubble-gum trading cards. And just judging by its product you can tell that Facebook is a stunningly creative company.

I really, really love Facebook, and love Google, too. I just always hope that the best engineers at both places, when it’s their time to leave, do so to work at a tiny startup or to start their own company. Deciding otherwise is understandable of course: the pay at a newer company is speculative, the hours are maybe worse than Facebook’s, but it’s a different kind of fun, feeling like the whole place would keel over if you didn’t do your part.)

The post One in Five Facebook Employees Has No Imagination Whatsoever appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Over the same fortnight, TechCrunch has written about only one other company so often — exactly as often in fact — and that is Google, with hundreds of products and $180 billion in market capitalization, which has in the past 15 days settled its dispute with book publishers, announced a $750M acquisition with federal anti-trust implications, and launched a major new rival to the iPhone.

By comparison, TechCrunch has only written 34 times about Facebook, often as an afterthought, in a post about Twitter.

But don’t blame TechCrunch; its Twitter articles get more traffic than posts about almost any other subject. And besides, while the distribution of overall media coverage is different from TechCrunch’s distribution, it isn’t that different. It’s the nature of news organizations to cover new companies more than old companies, and thank goodness for Redfin and all the other new companies in the world that this is so. It’s also undeniable that Twitter’s popularity among the media is in part driven by Twitter’s usefulness to the media, especially now that every journalist feels compelled to build her own personal brand.

But even if Twitter’s importance among journalists is natural and even good, entrepreneurs may not want to accord it the same importance.

It’s natural for us to focus on the bright shiny company, too. We certainly have here at Redfin, discussing all sorts of features to encourage Redfin users to share data via our site using Twitter. But we also survey our users two or three times a year, and here’s what we found last week when we asked 450 consumers what social networks they use: that they prefer Facebook by a margin of nearly 5 to 1.

So straight away, Redfin’s Lisa Taylor started working on sprucing up our local Facebook pages in Seattle, the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA, Orange County, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, DC and New York. Please join up!

And meanwhile, we wondered: could our users’ preference for Facebook be because our demographic is different? Well actually if any group of consumers could skew toward Twitter, it would be Redfin’s user-base, big-time: according to the same survey, our users are mostly male, about a third high-tech, and young but not too young (none of the teenagers who prefer Facebook are likely to be looking for a house). It’s hard to imagine a business with a meaningful cross-section of consumers that would have a different result.

So journalists and bloggers should keep talking about Twitter. But entrepreneurs shouldn’t always listen, at least not yet.

The post It's Facebook, Stupid (Not Twitter, by a Margin of 5 to 1) appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

“Someone,” Michael says, “needs to create a new technology that allows us to enjoy our life but not miss important messages.”

But if Michael wanted fewer messages, he could just switch to a private address without telling me what it is. Every time we write an email rather than call, or add another distant “friend” to Facebook, we choose a network over true friendship, communication without commitment. And usually, we’re choosing what we want.

This is a process that starts early: the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik recently wrote about the imaginary friend his toddler talks to on her toy-cellphone, usually only to say that she’s too busy to talk to him.

And it began a long time ago. The critic Hugh Kenner speculated that the disembodied voices of modern poetry grew out of the invention of the telephone. What I grew up seeing as a way to reach out and touch someone, a previous generation saw as a paltry substitute.

And now that’s how I now see Facebook, as a paltry — but not quite dispensable — substitute. Facebook comforts us with the thought that we have lots of friends. And yet the prestige that this network offers is the opposite of security, that 8^th-grade sense we got from knowing exactly who our friends were.

The “social utility” of friends on Facebook is different than other forms of friendship. Most of my friends’ Facebook updates have the quality of overheard cell phone calls: mundane, impossible not to listen for, really only half of a conversation, but also comforting. Someone stuck in Singapore for a year once told me that what he missed most was the English chatter of overheard conversations.

This is why I’ve stopped checking Facebook throughout the day, but then suddenly find myself, alone in the wee hours of the night, glad to see everyone there. The feeling it gives me was best described in Augie March: “Wherever it was dark there was this sound, continental and hemispheric, again and again, like surf, and continuous and dense as stars.”

Saul Bellow was writing about falling asleep to the chirping of insects, but now that sound is the buzz of our friends. Maybe the one-line updates of Facebook have just reduced communication to what we really need to hear, over and over again: “Are you there?” “Yes, I am (everything’s fine).”

(photo credit: Moriza on Flickr)

The post A Sound as Continuous and Dense As Stars appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.