[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6BPuKaLel4[/youtube]

Google just announced you can now use Google Earth on your iPhone. This is huge.

With just a swipe of your finger you can fly from Peoria to Paris to Papua New Guinea, or anywhere in between. It may be small, but it brings all the power of Google Earth to the palm of your hand, including all of the same global imagery and 3D terrain. You can even browse any of our 8 million Panoramio photos or read Wikipedia articles.

With Google Earth for iPhone, you can:
• Tilt your iPhone to adjust your view to see mountainous terrain
• View the Panoramio layer and browse the millions of geo-located photos from around the world
• View geo-located Wikipedia articles
• Use the ‘Location’ feature to fly to your current location
• Search for cities, places and business around the globe with Google Local Search

It’s available today in 18 languages and 22 countries in the iTunes App Store.

This is a radical new way to interact with a virtual world and it blew me away when I loaded it on my iPhone.

Google Earth has always been a fantastic environment, perfect for real estate search (see Navigating a Virtual World). But it was always hampered by the mouse and click mechanics necessary with the desktop version. Pairing it with the iPhone’s amazing touchscreen and gesture recognition capabilities makes perfect sense.

While this initial release only permits certain data sources — Wikipedia and Panaramio, to name a few — imagine being able to import a property search via a KML file or better yet, layer in live neighborhood information, real estate market data or listings from Google Base.

Do that and it’s not too far of a leap to think that the iPhone or iPod touch, combined with the 3D environment presented in Google Earth, could very well become the mobile real estate search mechanism of choice.

You can download Google Earth for your iPhone or iPod touch through the iTunes App Store.

Update: A couple of tips I figured out: Use a two-finger drag up and down to tilt view vertically. Two finger twist rotates the viewing angle.

iphone, google earth, real estate search

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In one of the more interesting announcements to come out of Connect last week, Coldwell Banker announced it had modeled a real life listing inside of the virtual world Second Life. (You can see the full property details here)

As far as a publicity gimmick, it was inspired – but as far as a practical way to market a listing it strikes me as an expensive, time-consuming practice.

Second Life, which claims over 8 million virtual residents, has been a hotbed of corporate activity recently trying to get a handle on Web 2.0 environments. This is not new territory for CB either, as it has already opened a virtual office in the world. (see Coldwell Banker Opens Office in Second Life)

But as a recent issue of Wired magazine reported, this push by Fortune 500 companies has been largely ignored by most residents (see How Madison Avenue Is Wasting Millions on a Deserted Second Life) who seem more interested in exploring the seedy side of cyberspace.

If CB really wanted to explore marketing listings in a virtual world, they would be better advised to use a tool like Google’s SketchUp to create a 3D model of the home and populate inside of Google Earth. (see It’s a Google world)

This approach has several advantages. One, it’s free.

Secondly, Google Earth is far more accessible to average consumers. Users do not have to register with the service, a simple download to their desktop suffices. Further, users do not have to create an ‘avatar’ and subject themselves Second Life’s unituitive learning curve, with it’s bizarre teleport and flying behaviors.

Google Earth is a complex 3D rendering of the real world, but one that ultimately is easy to navigate – and a listing inside its confines has the necessary context and relevancy missing in Second Life.

Marketing a property with Google Earth doesn’t have the headline pull of putting a listing inside Second Life – but at the end of the day, could be far more practical and useful.

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Ask City launches to take on Windows Live Local, Google Local and Yahoo Local. At first glance, it looks like a solid, competitive offering. I particularly like the ability to take a snapshot (bookmark) of your searches and save them for future use.

Ask City incorporates features from a number of third-party sources but, most interestingly for real estate readers, from Yelp, Judy’s Book and CitySearch. These sources power Ask City’s ratings for each listing it returns. Here’s a listing of Agents & Brokers in my zip code, as an example.

Regular readers will know, I’ve been harping on the growing importance of online reputation management (e.g. Rapleaf’s Real World Feedback System) for a while now. I think Ask’s new product aptly demonstrates this point as it is pushing these rankings/ratings deeper into the mainstream. Agents and brokers are going to have to be aware of the need to monitor their rankings on these search sites as I think they are going to increasingly become important lead generators.

Trulia adds Google Earth (kml) feeds to its search results bringing my dream of conducting a Virtual World real estate search one step closer.

Carnival of Real Estate is up at the Property Monger.

Real Estate Bookmarks is a del.icio.us clone designed specifically for sharing real estate-related bookmarks. Their database seems to be mainly populated with agent sites, though it does seem to work easily enough. I created an account and added my site with little trouble. Honestly, I can’t see the point though, as del.icio.us works just fine for me right now.

Speaking of del.icio.us, you can see my bookmarks on del.icio.us here. I’ve also been trying to get the del.icio.us “thingy” to automatically post my daily links to this blog – but with little success. If any of you can figure it out, let me know.

Finally, if you have an article, blog post or specific tidbit you’d like to share with me, tag it with the ‘tforem’ tag to del.icio.us and I’ll be sure to read it.

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