The nice folks at Scripps sent me an email fleshing out more detail about Frontdoor’s Facebook Connect integration. I’ve excerpted a few sections below since they give some greater context to the feature.

As you surmised, the Facebook Connect rollout is a work in progress. Truth be told, we’re about 50% finished with the actual rollout and we expect to have everything buttoned up by June 1.

However, there are a few nuances to what is live now that I’d like to point out:

Work in Progress
As you note, a person’s MyFrontDoor and Facebook accounts are not fully integrated yet. This is the final stage of our build that will go live very early June. When that happens, you will be able to authenticate and gain access to certain features more quickly than going through a FrontDoor-only registration process. For example, we’ll be able to pre-populate certain registration fields without a user having to fill those in. That said, there are limitations in their API that will force us to continue to require a select few pieces of information, such as email addresses and zip codes. Email addys are particularly necessary because Facebook doesn’t pass that info along to us and we need that as a backup unique identifier to maintain their account in the event (God forbid) that Facebook should go POOF or somehow alter how Connect works. In any case, however, it will be faster and friendlier with Facebook Connect than without it.

Very cool. Exactly how I would want it to work.

What’s Live Now
Right now our Facebook Connect features allow you to do some subtle, yet key, things:

On every listing on our site there is a Facebook share function. With Connect, that share function becomes much richer than standard FB share functionality (non-FB Connect) that other sites use. For example, with FB connect on FrontDoor, when you click “share” we can pre-populate the share text and personalize it with your name and extend an invitation for your friends to interact with it. The standard non-FB Connect share function simply pulls in meta tags from the site. We think the FB Connect approach makes for a more personal, social experience because it shows a user being actively engaged and we can actively ask for your friends’ feedback.

On the editorial side, you have even more options with the FrontDoor-FB Connect combo. From every article on our site, you can not only share an article (again with personalization), you can also directly update your Facebook status from the right rail of the page. Again, just two more ways to personalize the experience and invite your friends to join in. I invite you to give it a try. We’re pretty sure that all these opportunities create a better environment for sharing without getting in the way of the search / reading experience.

All in all it shows that the FD folks are really thinking this through. I still come back the fact that they are integrating a widely popular social networking tool into their site; to streamline the interaction with the site rather than relying on cumbersome profiles or proprietary user accounts that aren’t portable.

I would love for this approach to be more widely adopted by brokers websites particularly and/or some of the more progressive website vendors. Making your sites easier to interact with. What a concept. Your consumers will thank you for it.

Share on Facebook

Frontdoor.com, HGTV’s foray into the real estate search space, now lets you sign in to the site (sort of) with your Facebook account.

It’s a great idea in theory, I’m all for lowering the friction points that exist to interact with any site. Sign up processes, while necessary, are often clumsy and time consuming as a user. Letting me use one of existing online profiles through Facebook Connect, Google Friend Connect or even OpenID makes that step a breeze. One click and I’m in.

Use of universal logins are in their infancy for sure. OpenID is gaining ground but you may as well use Navajo on your site as far as mainstream consumers are concerned.  So kudos to Frontdoor for taking a step in the right direction. Their product is clearly aimed at the middle of the bell curve consumer rather than the bleeding edge search nerds, so having it connect to Facebook is definitely a smart move.

But unfortunately, in its current state, it doesn’t go far enough. Or anywhere for that matter. As far as I can tell logging in to Frontdoor with my Facebook account (while it was a snap) didn’t really seem to allow me to do much.

In fact, beyond pulling in my avatar at the top of the page, I couldn’t figure out what it did at all.

Personally, I’d love for it to integrate more deeply with the MyFrontdoor account and allow me to share and save properties or save my searches. Right now it seems I still have to sign up for a separate account and even then the two aren’t even linked.

Now it could be this is a limitation of the API. But it would be great if you could integrate your profiles on other social networks into search tools like Frontdoor. If you could post found properties to my profile or to groups of friends inside my existing social graph, for example. How about allowing me to identify promote my own house for sale (if it were) to my wall. How cool would that be?

I like where Frontdoor is going with this. Hopefully we’ll see more to come soon.

Share on Facebook

Google Insights for Search is a fantastic new tool that allows you to dig into Google’s search volume patterns to find trends.

While I think there are a lot of ways you can use this tool (see agentgenius.com), I think that for most marketers the geographic breakdowns will be one of the most interesting – mainly because it can help identify brand awareness in any particular location.

Let’s look at the national brand awareness of the big search portals:

Strong Nationwide (Near universal brand awareness)

Realtor.com

Yahoo! Real Estate

Regionally Strong (Strong in specific regions; east, west, south, north)

Zillow.com

Trulia.com

Confined Awareness (Searches confined to single States)

Cyberhomes

Frontdoor.com

Poor roost.com did not have enough search volume to show any results.

(h/t Sellsius blog)

Share on Facebook

Congratulations to Kelly Roark, occasional contributor to this blog, who has taken a new position with Frontdoor.com as their new VP of Interactive Sales and Development.

Kelly, as many of you know, was formerly VP of Industry Development with Trulia.com. More on ClickZ.

In addition to acquiring some great talent though, Frontdoor has also updated its site with a bit of a face lift. The homepage has been transformed to a much cleaner experience.

What I wrote when Frontdoor first launched (see Scripps Cracks Open the Door):

I also don’t think they’ve quite nailed down the separation of content and search. The homepage seemed awfully crowded with information, which potentially could confuse consumers. Scripps should take a page from the Real Estate 2.0 play book and look to pare down the homepage a bit.

This time around they’ve definitely improved the look of the site. Search is much more clearly displayed at the top of the page and you can quickly switch between searching listings and content.

Video is still above the fold as are three of their ‘hero’ stories – though one of the links (‘Types of Homes’) seems to be broken…

Striking the right balance between content and search is going to be key to Frontdoor’s success. And if they can nail it, they stand a really good chance of doing big things in this space.

It’s still a work in progress and their making quick strides in the right direction. Personally, I still think there is a little too much happening on the homepage – and especially when you dive down into some of the content pages (e.g Buy a Home) it gets really confusing.

I know firsthand (from working on the new Inman.com) how challenging it is to build a decent content section and I’m certainly not going to pretend I have all the answers. But my instinct is still telling me less is more, especially on the homepage, and there needs to be better flow on the content pages – my eye jumps around far too much on them.

On the search side. I like how quick the search results are returned. Frontdoor’s implementation of neighborhood boundaries is really slick too. I love how I can punch in a zip code, then immediately jump to the right neighborhood I’m looking for. It really is a much more natural way of kicking off a real estate search. I’d love to be able to combine multiple neighborhoods though.

Like Zillow and Trulia, Frontdoor is sourcing the listings from broker partners and its inventory feels a little sparse (in the areas I was searching anyway). And Frontdoor fails the Joel-Lunchtime-Dogwalking-Test by returning exactly none of the homes I know (from my lunchtime walks with my dog, natch) are for sale in my neighborhood.

But I know they’re working busily on that front as well as on making the upgrades to the site. I’d expect to hear some more on that front very soon.

UPDATE: Inman News reports Prudential’s listings going to FrontDoor.com as well as Trulia (see Trulia Ropes in Prudential?)

Share on Facebook

I had a chance today to sit down and talk with the folks from the publishing giant Scripps, which is in the process of splitting itself into two divisions; traditional media publishing and a new interactive division (more on paidContent.org). One of their new Internet initiatives is a real estate site, Frontdoor.com.

I said in an earlier post when AOL relaunched its site (see A Dinosaur Stirs – AOL Real Estate Relaunches) that the big media conglomerates haven’t been ignoring the online trend in real estate and will be probably begin adopting much of what’s been pioneered to date by the Real Estate 2.0 crowd and rolling out their own web properties. Frontdoor.com is just the first of what I suspect will be a number of new real estate sites we’ll see.

Scripps owns the hugely popular HGTV brand, that is home to popular programs like “House Hunters” and “Designed to Sell”. Interestingly, they’ve said that despite the overall sluggishness in the market, the ratings for these real estate programs have not slowed down. According to the company, the most recent ratings even showed that the network had its highest ever prime time rating this past October.

Obviously, Scripps is hoping that their massive consumer brand awareness (they hit more than 95 million households on air) and that the cross-promotional opportunities that television presents will translate to a hugely popular online real estate destination.

One of the big challenges the Real Estate 2.0 crowd continues to face is building consumer awareness of their platforms. Sites like Zillow and Trulia have taken tentative steps towards building this recognition (see Trulia Hits the Streets), and while Scripps definitely fingers the two as competition, they are confident that they hold the edge.

Frontdoor’s major point of differentation is that they are trying mix together the killer combination of search and content to create the ultimate real estate portal – Dustin at 4Realz likes the concept too. This is something the Real Estate 2.0 crowd has also tried to do, to varying degrees of success. But while Zillow and Trulia are largely relying on User Generated Content – Scripps is banking on its archives of professionally produced content.

The question is, which will resonate most with consumers?

As far as the site itself, I was pretty impressed. It’s still in Beta, and so as yet it is not complete. Scripps assured me they have a full product road map in place and are in it for the long haul.

On the search side, listings are provided by broker feeds. Right now they claim to have about 40% of active listings – they expect to be up to about 50-60% within in the next month and to about 70% coverage by the first half of next year. To back that up, since news of the new site broke a few days ago, Scripps claims to have had over 200 requests from brokers to provide their feeds.

Search functionality was decent, and has some slick AJAX integration. I liked the expandable map and the site’s overall responsiveness to my queries. The search filters on the other hand seemed a little buried below the fold.

Again, this is all in Beta, and Scripps promises to add several layers of neighborhood and radius search in the near future. And interestingly, they said the way that expandable map will be implemented will be different based on urban and suburban searches.

I also don’t think they’ve quite nailed down the separation of content and search. The homepage seemed awfully crowded with information, which potentially could confuse consumers. Scripps should take a page from the Real Estate 2.0 play book and look to pare down the homepage a bit.

The big question is how they intend on monetizing the site. Advertising is the obvious route here and Scripps already has established relationships with major brand advertisers that they can leverage.

Where they go after that is still unclear; whether they go the Homescape model and leverage their platform to power their partner newspapers’ sites, or the Realtor.com model of providing Realtors with a featured-listing marketing platform.

If it’s the latter, I suspect they’ll enjoy a fair degree of success. Ultimately Realtors will want to put their ad dollars where the potential customers are and while the geek cred factor of Zillow and Trulia are high, Frontdoor may just yet challenge them on the consumer eyeballs.

[poll=5]

Share on Facebook