by photomagister

Developers looking for new ways to mashup data on a neighborhood level (two of my current favorite applications are Walk Score and Drive Score) have a couple new options this week.

First, Urban Mapping released its free Neighborhood boundary API and now Zillow has followed suit, releasing over 7000 individual boundary files.

What’s in it for Zillow? Well, it’s a perfect example of crowdsourcing their development. Zillow hopes the folks that use the definitions can in turn refine them and then pitch them back into the mix.

From ZillowBlog:

We’ll add them to the database of neighborhoods available for download and will work to eventually integrate them into Zillow.

Makes perfect sense – especially since their neighborhood definitions (at least where I live) are not exactly perfect (see Zillow Launches New Smart Search Feature).

Nevertheless, kudos to both for releasing this kind of valuable geo-data to the wild. It’s way above my head, but I’m sure someone out there will have some ideas on how to use it.

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I guess I’ll join the pile on. Terabitz launched this morning, and was greated largely by a big yawn in the RE blogosphere.

The site looks great. Works easy enough as well. So, why the disinterest then?

Part of it might be a general malaise I sense sweeping online real estate. The big ideas that launched a year ago now seem a little stale. The appetite for all things real estate all the time, may be waning as consumers move on to the next big trend and the easy money is no longer to be found.

And unfortunately, while providing a pretty face and some fancy AJAX implementation, Terabitz is really recycling old ideas (see Finding the Perfect Location with Neighborhoodmatch.com) into a new shell.

The big story here really seems to be that the company was given $10 million in VC funding and was originally conceived by a 15 year old kid, who is now the CTO of the company. He rounds out a team based of former execs from HouseValues and Move.com and surprisingly, Travis Chow, formerly of Neighboroo (see Neighboroo Adds New Data To Neighborhood Research).

This company isn’t shy about dishing out the hyperbole either. Gotta love a press release that starts like this:

Every now and then consumers are introduced to a product that fundamentally changes the rules, rendering all prior offerings insufficient or even obsolete. Consider what iTunes has done for music, TiVo for television, or eBay for auctions, to name a few.

What Terabitz does give you is a real estate “dashboard” which you can customize with various data sources, including local amenities and market data. Start with an address and then pick and choose and drag and drop up to nine modules on your page.

1000Watt blog calls it the “Netvibes for real estate” and you could probably accomplish many of the same results had you just used that site. Yahoo Pipes would let you do the same thing too.

My biggest gripe with the site is I had no idea from where it was pulling its data. Other than the obviously branded icons (Zillow, Craigslist, Google) – I’m not sure where the data is coming from and how accurate it is.

Case in point, the comps it pulled on my house ranged from $75K to $1.49 Million. I’m no real estate agent, but that doesn’t seem right to me.

Terabitz is not a bad effort out the gates. Just weakly defined and it doesn’t really solve any pressing need for me. If they can better refine the concept on pulling a few key data sources together rather than everything including the coffee cup, then they may be onto something.

More on Terabitz from BloodhoundBlog and VentureBeat.

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