Friedman used to be one of my favorite writers. In Beirut to Jerusalem, when he talked about two sheiks on a flight to the Middle-East tossing bricks of gold back and forth, he was compulsively interesting.

But now that Friedman is back in the U.S., he occasionally seems less like a world-wise foreign correspondent than a credulous, honey-didja-see-that tourist. This article on entrepreneurs is just a bad example. First, he doesn’t bother to talk to actual entrepreneurs. As he himself admits, his essay mostly comes from two academics at non-profit institutions:

I asked two of the best people on this subject, Robert Litan, vice president of research and policy at the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in innovation, and Curtis Carlson, the chief executive of SRI International, the Silicon Valley-based innovation specialists.

What’s odd about Friedman choice of sources is that he opened the essay by criticizing the Obama administration for being too “heavily staffed by academics, lawyers and political types.” Yet his first source, Robert Litan — a great thinker and writer — is three for three: he worked as an academic, studied law at Yale, and often writes government reports (incidentally, Litan also wrote an essay in the New York Times that prompted us to testify before Congress). The other source, Curtis Carlson, lists his primary avocation as the violin.

True to form, these folks have proposed a new government department of entrepreneurialism, headed by a cabinet-level minister called “Secretary Newco.” Like low-salt Chinese cooking, this sad phrase is a contradiction in terms: what government minister is an entrepreneur?

Friedman briefly mentions an entrepreneur’s visa, which is a worthy goal, but then suggests we offer a visa to any foreign student who graduates from a U.S. college. Regardless of how I may feel about immigration, this is an overly broad, unrealistic suggestion: someone who studies hotel management at UNLV isn’t likely to start a company just because she’s from the Congo or Italy.

Friedman then proposes “cut[ting] the capital gains tax for any profit-making venture start-up from 15 percent to 1 percent.” This is nonsense: a venture-funded startup usually isn’t “profit-making,” and in any event a startup doesn’t pay capital gains taxes. Employees and investors pay capital gains taxes when selling the stock of a company that was, at some point in the past, a startup.

Moreover, the capital gains tax as it stands is not a problem: the most tax-efficient way to become a millionaire is by selling stock in your own company. You pay a lower tax rate on that money than most middle-class Americans. Friedman also calls for lower rates of corporate income tax on startups, even though a startup would only pay taxes once it began making profits. In four years, Redfin has barely paid any corporate income taxes, and now that we sometimes earn money, we don’t mind the tax.

The errors continue, with Friedman riding the old battle-horse to repeal “Sarbanes-Oxley reporting for new companies.” But new companies don’t have a Sarbanes-Oxley reporting requirement. Sarbanes-Oxley only applies to publicly traded businesses, which are usually at least five years old.

Even if Friedman is talking about lifting Sarbanes-Oxley requirements for companies in their first few years as a publicly traded stock, I think he is missing the point. As we’ve argued before, the reason for the dearth of IPOs hasn’t been due to Sarbanes-Oxley laws but because, a few years ago, so few startups were generating consistent profits, and so few entrepreneurs were interested in the long haul.

Finally, Friedman talks about policies that “encourage private investment.” He seems oblivious to the fact that too much money is what’s breaking venture capital right now. We don’t have a shortage of capital, or even a shortage of ideas. We have a shortage of engineers.

And this is precisely where government can help. My alma mater, U.C. Berkeley, has long been one of the principal sources of engineering talent in Silicon Valley. Last year, Berkeley was forced to cut its budget by $813 million, or 20%. Top-flight professors are leaving the nation’s leading public university in droves. The same scene is replaying itself across the U.S., including here in Seattle at the University of Washington.

You would think the whole Valley would be up in arms over such a calamity. I for one wish Friedman would have mentioned undergraduate education somewhere in his essay. Within the technology community, we all know that the reason America is #1 in technology isn’t because of our regulations, cabinet ministers or tax code; it’s because we have had the best universities in the world, which produce the best thinkers, scientists and engineers. We have only recently come to realize how delicate those universities are.

This is why I just can’t bear to hear folks talk about Secretary Newco, cutting the capital gains taxes for millionaires and billionaires, or eliminating the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations that emerged after Enron struck the first of many blows against our faith in public markets. Our once-proud research institutions are struggling to fulfill their mission in society. They need the government’s support. They need Tom Friedman’s support. They need your support.

If we’re going to rally behind a cause, we don’t have to look further than that.

The post What the Government Could Really Do to Support Entrepreneurs appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

GREAT QUESTION! This is a topic we’ve discussed before, predicting last March that e-commerce would enjoy a new vogue, and publishing in 2007 our manifesto that e-commerce still had the most potential to fulfill the role that technology is always supposed to play in economics: making markets more efficient.

But we have never discussed what will set apart the new generation of e-commerce companies. My thinking about this changed last fall, when Menlo Ventures’ Shawn Carolan reviewed the pitch we used to raise money from Greylock, and concluded that Redfin was “a media company mating with an e-commerce company.”

What he meant was that Redfin generates its own traffic, functioning as a destination site for lookie-loos to browse homes they have no intention of buying, or that they have no intention of using Redfin to buy. And then we are also a commerce company, representing buyers and sellers in the purchase or sale of a home. As Iago would say, we’re a beast with two backs.

Building up our own bona fide media site frees us from the prison-house grind of buying and monetizing traffic, of merely offering a service for a few pennies more than it costs us to deliver it, and into a garden of delights: our project, with Redfin’s search site, is to please. Every time we consider an ad campaign, we decide we’d rather spend the money on an engineer to make Redfin search better. The only ads we’ll pay for are the ones we show to millions of people on our own site, for free.

This is why, as Bob Hagerty notes in last week’s Wall Street Journal, we built the top-rated iPhone app for real estate, even though the application is almost entirely free of any mechanism for users to work with one of our agents. The iPhone app accounts for 10% of our traffic on weekends, when home-buyers are out looking at properties in force. Using mobile devices to engage users deeper in the process is a big reason Redfin has taken off over the past 12 months.

So we would suggest that one characteristic of a commerce 2.0 company has to be that it generates its own traffic, by creating a sense of community, by publishing unique content or offering unique inventory. And we think that the commerce companies, once they stop merely buying and converting traffic with screaming “BUY NOW” sites, are often best suited to generate their own traffic, because we know what buyers want.

Imagine if you wanted to create a book review site without Amazon’s catalog of every book that has been published; it would be near-impossible. By the same token, Redfin now recognizes immediately when a home sells and for how much because we are members of the Multiple Listing Service used by brokers to list homes and record sales; we can be the authoritative site on where the market’s headed simply because we know a month ahead of everyone else what sold.

This advantage is not simply an artifact of the MLS’s exclusive rules. Since we write offers, we know that in my neighborhood offers just started going for above asking price for the first time in years; since we tour houses, we know that buyers are shifting to short sales due to new anti-foreclosure laws limiting REO inventory. We’re in the game, baby! By comparison, other sites seem to be watching the game on tape delay, from a Goodyear Blimp.

What Josh, Fred and Shawn made me realize is that we’re headed for a world where the whole division between e-commerce pure-plays and media pure-plays — which I have often emphasized — is a canard. The media companies could generate far more revenue per visitor if they took Ethan Lowry’s advice from the last Naked Truth: “get as close to the transaction as you possibly can.” And the e-commerce companies could get higher margins — which investors have been insisting on throughout the great e-commerce drought — if we stopped buying traffic and started making our own.

The post A Media Company Mating with an E-Commerce Company appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

A couple of weeks before starting my marketing internship at Redfin, I emailed my boss-to-be Matt Goyer to ask if there was any reading I should do before I started. He suggested some books to read and blogs to follow, but he also said, “Jump on Twitter if you haven’t already.”

I had heard of Twitter before, but the only Twitter user I knew was one of my former TAs who was both old (i.e. over 25) and married. To me and my friends, Twitter was something that only 30-something-year-old, white males did when they were bored; none of us had ever used it before, and none of us really had a reason to try. Why would we Tweet when we have Facebook? Who’s really narcissistic enough to think that other people care about what he’s doing at any moment in the day?

Since working at Redfin, however, I’ve gained a newfound appreciation for Twitter. I’ve seen how unhappy customers who Tweet about Redfin can get better service, how Twitter can provide news faster than any traditional news source, how people can gain a voice through Twitter that would otherwise be suppressed. And yet, I still don’t Tweet. I’ve got an account, but I’ve never updated—and I don’t really feel the need.

From a sociological perspective, I find Twitter fascinating. While any one Tweet is relatively insignificant, taken as a whole Twitter becomes a pulse on societal trends and thoughts. I can search for all mentions of Redfin to see how people are reacting to the news that we’re finally profitable, or I can see what people are saying about the new Harry Potter movie. But I’ve got news for you: teens don’t care. Fundamentally, I don’t care about what goes on outside my bubble of friends and family. Does some random woman in New York love Twilight? I don’t care. Are people enraged that Goldman Sachs is making billions after receiving bailout money? Meh.

Herein lies the problem with Twitter: the most interesting uses of Twitter are irrelevant to teenagers. We don’t need to track a company’s image, we don’t want to build our personal brand, we don’t care to listen to random people on the internet. While Twitter’s power emerges when it amasses the voices of thousands of people, the typical teenager doesn’t have thousands of friends to follow. And without this critical mass, the Tweets lose their significance and devolve into narcissistic updates about their friends’ lives. Who needs that when we already have Facebook, especially when Facebook provides so much more information about those we care about?

Twitter is a wonderful, innovative service that has already had a meaningful impact on society and acts as a useful tool for businesses and web personalities, but it shouldn’t come as a shock that Twitter isn’t popular amongst teens. But I ask, does it need to be?

The post Teens and Twitter appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

It was a curious response to what may be a titanic shift in how advertising works. Twitter seems ready to depart from the business model of every Internet media giant that preceded it, including AOL, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, which comes as news that many folks who are deeply invested in current media models just don’t want to hear.

Rather than inserting ads into, above or alongside the stream of authentic consumer voices, Twitter seems likely to charge its clients for being able to monitor and channel that stream. As Biz explains, “facilitating connections between businesses and individuals in meaningful and relevant ways is compelling.” Imagine, for example, a stream of tweets about how great Redfin is that Twitter would associate with the Redfin keyword or that we would integrate into our own site. Redfin would pay for that.

But we’d never pay for traditional ads on Twitter. The whole idea behind many ads — drawing me to a site with A then forcing me to sit through B — doesn’t work in a world where the consumer increasingly controls when and how he consumes media. It’s too easy just to skip ahead via Tivo or install an ad-blocker in Firefox. And even if I see the ad, many ads just don’t compete with the truth very well these days, which on a Yelp or Avvo now often appears right alongside the ad.

Subjective and Objective, Together for the First Time
Ten years ago, in the absence of reviews from people who seemed just like me, ads once held enormous sway on my purchasing decisions. Sure I could have looked at Consumer Reports, if I really needed someone else to tell me to buy sensible shoes. But even Consumer Reports never had the temerity to put the objective and subjective alongside one another. What’s the point of buying an ad when your product already had the highest rating? Or the lowest? This is the problem that all review sites — that the Internet itself — has to solve. It’s hard to be a truth-teller and an advertiser all in one place.

This is not to say that advertising is dead, only that it has to evolve into a more subtle, emotional medium. What matters isn’t the reach or frequency of a media purchase but the ability of an ad to communicate at an almost atavistic level. Geoffrey Miller, a University of New Mexico professor who recently published “Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior,” argues that most marketers don’t know how to speak to the primitive brain’s true needs for prestige and better breeding opportunities. These are feelings beyond the dispute of a review or a Google search.

Focusing on Feelings, not Demographics
It seems like Professor Miller understands better than Madison Avenue why some ads lodge in our consciousness. Rather than slicing and dicing consumers into traditional demographic buckets based on age and income, Miller encourages advertisers to think in terms of how a product expresses the traits evolution has programmed us to value: openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion.

The photo-editing website Picnik is a perfect example of this emotional sensitivity; while the Flash application loads, the site talks about “buttering the bread” and “warming the breeze” for a picnic. And that’s what I like most about the site, is how its silly little progress bar makes me feel, which is overwhelmingly agreeable.  I wish Redfin as a website was that emotionally coherent.

Internet marketing in particular, and ads in general, have enormous power to make us feel. Some of the last things I will ever forget aren’t leaving home for college or driving a U-Haul out of San Francisco, but a cloying jingle like “ring around the collar,” which gave me one of my first intimations of the most powerful human emotion, shame.

It seems obvious that the most effective ads are involved in the formation of our personality, in large part because we re-broadcast those ads as an expression of ourselves. If you’ve ever listened to adolescent boys talk to one another, you know what I’m talking about: their entire conversation is an exchange of  ad jingles and movie lines. Twenty years later, I’m not much different. I’ve watched the exquisite Sony Bravia ad 40 or 50 times (only later to discover that its soundtrack was once my mother’s favorite song).  

As Google AdSense and its analogs in television and display advertising, Spotrunner and AdReady, have lowered the cost of placing an ad, we shouldn’t forget what really makes an ad powerful, which is the quality of the ad itself. There’s a reason why a television ad costs more to produce per frame than even the most elaborate special effects movie, which is just another way of saying it is more finely worked as a piece of art than many pieces of actual art.

Already using YouTube, an ad is distributed more by people who love the ad than by the media giants who are supposed to be cramming it down our throats. It seems like advertising needs to use pleasure rather than force, activity rather than passivity, focusing on what we want to see and interact with, channeling what we ourselves have said or wish we could say, rather than on the old blunt instruments of display advertising, intrusiveness and repetition. The Internet seems better suited to address this problem than any other medium, but we have to be awake to it.

I’m glad Biz Stone is.

The post Advertising is an Emotional Art appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

For any aspiring entrepreneur, Urban Spoon’s advice is a lot more actionable and realistic than the recently celebrated keynote at the Seattle 2.0 awards. Glen Kelman’s talk should come with a warning label: if you are listening to an entrepreneur give advice for 20 minutes and he’s talked about raising money and valuations but never mentioned making a profit, look out! In his talk, Glen assumes “sooner or later you are going to have to raise money” because, unlike Urban Spoon, he’s not thinking about living off the money his product makes or holding his spending as low as it can go the way Urban Spoon did.

I agree that Urbanspoon’s advice is more actionable and realistic; I wasn’t trying in the keynote to tell people what to do so much as express how we’ve all felt from time to time. Folks in the audience like Jonathan Sposato and Kelly Smith don’t want to hear from me how to run their businesses, especially not at an awards dinner.

The truth is that neither Adam nor I wrote or spoke much explicitly about how to turn a profit. But I did try to talk about profits from the start, saying that all our anxieties as entrepreneurs turn on whether we can make money. Later, I  encouraged entrepreneurs to build a product good enough that customers would pay for it and to focus on a meaningful problem as a means to profits rather than the other way around. Both Adam and I described working 18 hours a day in a crumby office for no or low pay as being the essential characteristic of life at a startup.
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Adding on to Josh’s critique, Brad Hefta-Gaub wrote that he agreed with Josh that too much attention has been paid to my (see comment from Brad) a “go big or go home” approach.

Here’s where I want to set the record straight. I have nothing but the highest respect for boot-strapped startups. They’ve done what Redfin tried but failed to do, which is get to profits without spending other people’s money. 

So why do folks think I feel otherwise? I can only assume that this beef began with a blog post I wrote last September, called Honey, I Shrunk the Startups. That essay took issue with two venture capitalists, Fred Wilson and Rob Monster, for arguing that the same big ideas we funded ten years ago for millions could now be launched for $100,000 or even $25,000, because of lower hardware costs and reusable software components.

I just didn’t see how $500-million venture funds can generate meaningful returns from 30 or 40 companies with $5 million exits, a problem which Fred himself has recently written extensively about. And I still worry that some big ideas — which will always take talent and time — have been cut down to size for lack of funds.

But the venture capital industry’s problems aren’t Urbanspoon’s problems. What I said about VCs’ need to get a big return on a few of their deals doesn’t apply to Urbanspoon.

And my preference for big ideas isn’t the same as a preference for big companies. Picnik, in my view is a big idea; can you imagine how hard it is to build Photoshop on the Web? Urbanspoon is a big idea, competing against entrenched competitors like Yelp and CitySearch. Both companies are small.

Given a choice, we would all prefer a startup with a big idea rather than a small idea. We would also all prefer one that spends less rather than more money to develop that idea. But a big idea that can be built for very little money isn’t always easy to come by.

So some of us pick  narrowly focused startups we can build on a dime, while others focus on big ideas that also take a lot of money. My argument has always been that there should be room for both, not just the small idea. As I said in the original post:

Trading college-girl gossip or graphing rock-band popularity is cool but we also need entrepreneurs willing to spend the time and money to f*** with the order of things.

And again a paragraph down:

Of course, some businesses don’t need a lot of money to get big. Others are happy to remain small. But there are big ideas that take time and money…

And a third time at the end:

The (TechCrunch50)  judges may argue over which contestant is the most clever or polished, but for those of you scoring at home, there’s room on the card for another column. Which startup is most likely to f*** with the order of things? We need a few of those too.

So I am not arguing that all startups should be big, or that big startups are better, only that we need startups with ideas large and small. The same Procrustean bed that stretched every startup in the ’90′s to be bigger is now scrunching some ambitious startups down. Big isn’t always better. But smaller isn’t always better either. VC-backed deals are best for some companies; boot-strapped companies are best for others. Arguing for one or the other is just silly.

The only startup I am arguing against is the venture-funded company built to self-destruct in 18 months, which never seeks to generate a profit because its only hope is to get bought before it has to. As I said in the original essay, these days, “most entrepreneurs don’t even aspire to build a self-sustaining business.” Given this emphasis, I’m not sure why Josh says I’m “not thinking about living off the money [my] product makes or holding [my] spending as low as it can go.”

Redfin is not a venture-bloated bully looking down its nose at other little startups. We aren’t looking down our nose at anybody. We’re fighting to get profitable and serve our customers well. We look at all the great startups in Seattle and we try to learn from everyone. Already this morning here at Redfin, we were all abuzz about what we could learn from Adam’s essay.

Of all the venture-funded companies to characterize as a goliath, Redfin must be the last choice. We started as a bootstrapped company with the first map-based real estate search and no money when we suddenly found ourselves staring down the barrel of two new map-based search companies run by terrifyingly brilliant people that would ultimately raise $120 million from Accel, Benchmark, Sequoia and a handful of hedge funds.

We’ve raised a sixth of that, even though our model is less capital-efficient: only Redfin has to hire actual customer service personnel in every city we serve. Maybe others think it was dumb for us to have chosen this, or just plain too expensive, but it was the only way we thought we could really change the game.

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Who knows whether Redfin will succeed. I think everyone would agree though that there’s a need to make big bets and small bets, and that Seattle will be better off when a decade from now one of today’s startups becomes a company like Microsoft, Real or Amazon, one that can buy other startup companies too. That’s still worth shooting for.

Many thanks to all the folks who showered kind words on the keynote. And thanks to Josh Petersen for giving us a reason to set the record straight.

The post Small is Beautiful, Too appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Other bubbles have left behind an excess of infrastructure that would later come in handy: railroad tracks, telegraph lines, Internet fiber. What will we have to show for this one? Some have suggested little more than a string of weedy Gulf-Coast ghost towns.

It’s hard to accept that that’s it. For all that we’re going through, we have to believe that we’ll come out changed in some important way, hopefully for the better.

So here on the Redfin blog, we’re publishing a series of posts on how different parts of the world we see flying by are different than the ones we had before: the Internet, the startup economy, the media and the real estate industry. Today we start with the changes that we have already begun to see on the Internet.

The Return of Software
It will come as no surprise that we are glad to see startups consider business models beyond free ad-supported sites. In July last year, we had complained that free software had become “Silicon Valley’s new religion,” an “adolescent anarchism” codified into a broad ideology that couldn’t apply to every sort of online business, particularly those that don’t reach a huge audience. Now 37Signals has joined the charge.

The reason for this is the pressure on startups to generate meaningful revenues now, even at a modest scale. It was easy once to raise money on the idea that your business would work at Yahoo’s scale, particularly if your goal was to get bought by Yahoo.

Google encouraged this behavior, by rewarding sites with more traffic that presented information in a generic way its indexing robots could understand, free of charge, rather than in the context of an application or for a fee. But now that fewer companies are buying and venture capitalists are wary of footing the bill, startups have turned to the most direct way to get money: from their users.

The iPhone App Store: Proof That Consumers Will Pay for Software
Consumers are ready to buy, buying software fast-food style on the iPhone, and shelling out for premium subscriptions on sites like Picnik and Animoto. And e-commerce businesses are enjoying a new vogue too. Three venture capitalists have approached an e-commerce company we know of in the past week, even though it isn’t raising any money now. Already, one entrepreneur in our building has recently shifted from a pure ad-driven model, and at least two others we know are planning to as well.

Commerce is How Software Makes Things Better
This is good news for the economy. Direct commerce is the simplest way for the web to do what technology is supposed to do: make something cheaper and better, usually by cutting out a middle man, not by creating a new one. Even though transactional businesses scale more slowly than media sites, they generate more revenue per website visitor — based on our experience in online real estate, by a factor of at least three to one.

Media Sites Become Web Applications
And it’s good news for software too. There’s a reason it’s hard to build great ad-supported software. For most ad-driven websites, the goal isn’t necessarily to engage an audience in the completion of any particular task so much as to redirect it toward a purchase on an advertiser’s site.

This is why, to take just one example from our world of online real estate, many ad-driven sites only show one photo of a home for sale, where we show 15. We want you to stay on Redfin until you buy the home. The media sites have to let you visit their advertiser’s site for more info.

MySpace and Facebook: Media Site vs. Web Application
This difference in approach is why MySpace can be a bit of a disaster zone for users but makes plenty of ad money, whereas Facebook is a powerful “social utility” that can’t get top-dollar for its ads. MySpace as a media site is just one page after another, like the New York Times as written by your teenager, on drugs. In Facebook, the pages are components of an application, working together so well that you never want to leave, even if it’s to visit an advertiser’s site . It’s no accident that MySpace is based in the media capital of the world, Hollywood, while Facebook is in the software capital of the world, Silicon Valley.

I’ve often wondered why Facebook doesn’t just charge people to stay on its site, since that’s clearly the intent of their web development, and it’s clearly what their users want to do too. A Flickr-style fee for storing additional photos or messages could perhaps generate more than $1 billion in revenue, in a way far less intrusive to its users than Facebook’s past ad-related blunders. Maybe that will happen soon, too.

This is not to say that you can’t build beautiful ad-driven sites, or that you can’t make money from those sites. The web is by far the world’s most powerful advertising medium. But it’s much more than that, too.

But what do you think? When this Great Recession has done its worst, what will the Internet will look like? Will the revenue pressure on web startups make it more mercenary, and less fun? Or will it just make it better? It’s hard not to believe that  a little less media and a few more web applications will make the Internet richer, and better.

The post After the Great Recession: What Will The Internet Look Like? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

We decided to do this now because our two-year contract with Microsoft was up for renewal. We did an evaluation and figured out a way to draw a large number of pushpins on GMaps very quickly. When we went with VE in 2006, GMaps was faster out of the box but slower once we started drawing on it, especially on IE6.

We like a lot of things about going with Google Maps:

• Fast downloads
• Fast drawing speeds
• Broad browser support
• High-resolution Geoeye-1 satellite images

We don’t like that we can no longer embed Bird’s Eye views on our site and that 3 developers spent four weeks to do the switch instead of adding more features. Plus, Redfin has had a very good relationship with the Microsoft Virtual Earth team, which we’ll miss. We’d like to give special thanks to Sujatha, the Microsoft PM who answered our e-mails, calls, and random entreaties with the utmost of professionalism and speed. We really only have good things to say about VE. Anyone looking to build a map-based Web 2.0 site has two solid choices.

In the end, it was speed, speed, speed that convinced us to switch. In our worst case scenario of 500 pushpins on the map in IE6, GMaps is 385% faster.

“Every millisecond counts” is a “Googley” UX design principle that we remember from Marissa Mayer’s evangelism of speed and that we strongly believe in (see here, here, and here). Users who come to Redfin’s site now should see maps load and render just a little bit quicker, which makes us feel a little Googley inside.

That’s it! Happy holidays from Redfin Engineering. You won’t hear from us until February, as we’re already working on a major release that will take a little more time. But it’ll be worth it. For those of you using the site, can you notice a performance difference? Leave a comment and let us know!

Bonus for developers: read about our experience switching from Virtual Earth to Google Maps. 

The post Our Maps Are Googley Now appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.

Of course, Dan was only being polite: the appeal of Yammer’s business model is that anyone can start using it (Redfin only has to pay to control it). And even if I’d said no, another Redfin employee would have started using it anyway.

So I said yes. And then thought: what does this mean? And what have we done? 

What Does Yammer Mean?
What Yammer means to me is first that there’s a new model for selling enterprise software, and it resembles nothing more than George Soros’s efforts to undermine the Soviets by air-dropping fax machines behind the Iron Curtain: tools are downloaded and used, with executives & IT only later having to accommodate the facts on the ground. The whole question of whether Yammer is actually productive is beside the point, because it’s so easy and fun.

Yammer also means something more, that email is broken: overwhelmed with spam, cumbersome to open, with responses feeling like an obligation rather than an option. If you want to deliver a message to someone, almost any other medium is more likely to get noticed: IM, Facebook, Twitter, RSS.

What Have We Done?
But the bigger question about Redfin’s use of Yammer is what have we done?

While I am glad to try a new technology — Dan is such a fearless pioneer — I worry that Yammer might be worse than work, and worse even than no-work. At least when you’re browsing ESPN.com, you feel bad about it. Yammer happens at work, and it sounds like work — you can always tell when someone is writing an email, IM or Twitter, because their typing is so much faster and noisier — so people think it is work, with one crucial exception: it may not get work done.

I’m not sure I buy the talk about collaboration. I’ve seen passive-aggressive arguments happen over email and (less over) IM — Skype’s workrooms are the exception; they’re awesome — that could have been avoided or settled in a few minutes face to face; will Yammer be much different?

As it is, I have elaborate fantasies about outlawing the whole Internet for hours at a time, or even for an entire workday. When I marvel at how a historical colossus like Theodore Roosevelt (definitive naval history of 1812, four-volume history of American frontier, a staggering number of slaughtered animals, U.S. President) or Honore de Balzac (dozens of coffee-fueled novels, written from midnight – 3 in the afternoon, while standing up) had time to accomplish so much, I usually attribute it to talent, servants — and no Internet.

Staving Off a Coup
But whether a shot at greatness is in anyone’s cards, I don’t have the guts to pull the plug on email, IM or Yammer for even a minute: there would be a coup, and Cynthia Pang would mount my head on a stake outside the Dexter-Horton building by the end of the day. I think a lot of executives who are asked about IM or Yammer agree to it for the same reason: they don’t want to seem like Scrooges or Luddites, and they’re not sure they could stop anyone anyway. And truth be told, we want our Yammer too.

Gentle reader and Dan Fabulich (who is, by the way, mutantly productive and far less curmudgeonly than I am) what do you think? Is Yammer good or bad for actually getting work done? Once we actually start using Yammer, we’ll report back on the results. Right now I’m not sure — but I’m excited to use it anyway.

(Flickr credit: soldiersmediacenter on Flickr)

The post Should Yammer Really Be Called Crammer? appeared first on Redfin Real Estate Blog.