Homethinking, the Realtor review site, has relaunched today with a totally redesigned site. The biggest change on the site is that it now displays property listings (pulled from HomeGain) on a Yahoo! Maps mashup. But, frankly I find the new layout confusing and a little busy.

Unfortunately, the major problem is I’m not sure where to start first. There seems to be far to much information on their home page and it’s just plain confusing how to get started on your search. Having both the top search bar and now the map search gives the user far too many options right off the bat.

Once you dive in however, a search in your zip code pulls up a series of recently sold properties and highlights the first property’s agent. Clicking on any of the other properties reveals the respective agent’s contact information. Moving on to the agent’s profile page, the map also displays all their currently listed properties. This part of the new site is as slick as it ever was.

A nice touch is the inclusion of Altos Research’s real time pricing trends graphs on each neighborhood page. (BTW – Altos Research maintains an excellent blog as well) Are we seeing a new competitor to Zillow’s API emerging here?

I really like the idea of a map based Realtor search – but I think Homethinking’s new site falls critically short in the usability department in its current form. A few tweaks would be all that it would take to make this a winner.

I would move the map off the homepage and to a secondary position deeper in the site to make it look less like a primary navigation tool. In my opinion, the map interface is most successful when you’re viewing an individual agent’s profile, where you can get a great visual sense of how much activity they’re currently generating. Everywhere else, it’s more of a distraction than anything else.

In a similar vein, Redfin launched a redesign of their site this past week. One of the biggest changes is they’ve simplified their homepage along the Find, Buy, Sell theme- as well as offering some new options to contact their agents with questions.

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I’m with Galen when he gives us five reasons to ditch Outlook for Google Apps. I’ve been using Gmail for a couple of years now and it has become my primary method of collecting, sorting and replying to my various email addresses. In fact, I find that I really only use my desktop email client (Apple’s Mail on my home iMac) for keeping an offline archive of all my conversations these days.

More recently, Google’s calendar app has replaced my Outlook calendar on my work PC, mainly since it allows me to access it wherever I can get an Internet connection. The only missing piece of the puzzle here is I haven’t found a simple way to sync Google Calendar with my phone (unfortunately, gCalSync doesn’t work on my phone, though it may work on yours.)

So now that Google is offfering its connectivity services to businesses, does that mean it’s time to replace your entire Office Suite for an online alternative? Google certain thinks one day you might and has recently rolled out a free online spreadsheet and aquired an online word processor to push you in that direction.

But if the thought of surrendering all your corporate computing to the Mountain View giant gets you a little nervous, there are other online Office alternatives out there.

Zoho is a company that I’ve been watching for a while and they have the most complete online office solution available right now, that rolls up a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software into a virtual office environment that also includes email, document sharing and calendar apps.

Zoho Writer was as functional as I needed it to be, as was Zoho Sheet and I was particularly impressed with Zoho Show, Zoho’s PowerPoint clone. Though all of the packages had some difficulty importing existing documents, especially heavily formatted Word documents or PPT decks – all were more than acceptable for new document creation.

Chicago-based 37 Signals offers Writeboard as part of its critically acclaimed Basecamp project management platform, which I’ve had the opportunity to use on a number of occasions. It’s less of an Office replacement than Zoho, but it offers an amazing boost to productivity through its file sharing, scheduling and time tracking functions.

So, is it time to replace your entire Office Suite for any of these alternatives? Well, the answer is, it depends. Online office suites are still very much in the development stage. Their biggest plus is that offer an unparalleled environment for people to share, work and collaborate on projects. Large brokers would probably see little return on switching away from the Office platform, but a smaller more nimble outfit could potentially see huge prodictivity gains and substancial cost savings by switching.

Another intriguiging possibility would be to mirror some of the document sharing and editing functions found in these Office suites, and modify them for use in a more secure environment to draft, table and edit real estate contracts. The Buyer and Seller representatives could then collaborate virtually on drafting a final contract. This could save a lot of time and energy that’s currently spent standing at a fax machine.

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Logo need an update? Web2.0ify it…

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Here’s a hilarious thread (it might be slow loading, as the site is getting hammered right now) where people are busily creating “Web 2.0″ versions of famous corporate logos – complete with gradients, reflections and soft pastels. Some of them are very clever and have had me laughing all afternoon.

Anyone want to take a stab at updating any of the Real Estate logos? God knows they need them. [via digg]

Technorati Tags: logos, web 2.0, logo design

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