Wow. That was quick.

Zillow makes one mention of getting into the neighborhood conversation game (see Teething Problems as Zillow Bears its Fangs) and the other players start fleeing…

Yourstreet, the neighborhood community site (see Real Estate Geeks Unite at YourStreet.com) just announced it has bailed out of the real estate space.

Are they running from Zillow or is it a sign that a sour market has dampened enthusiasm for real estate conversations?

An email from the founders this morning stated:

While we were happy with the initial version of the site, we thought we could do better – a lot better. Over the last few months we’ve learned that our users want to talk about all things local – not just real estate. We’ve also learned that keeping up with news about your neighborhood is really important.

So I’m excited to announce that we are overhauling YourStreet to focus on transforming the way you experience local news and information. While I can’t get into too many details yet, I can say that the new YourStreet will bring you closer to the news that really matters to you. YourStreet will be an entirely new way of exploring and learning about your street, your neighborhood and the world around you.

The site has been pulled down and is promising a relaunch in the Fall. But is this the first of the user-gen sites that’s heading for a Real Estate 2.0 Deadpool?

Reading between the lines it looks like they are refocusing around the Outside.In or Topix.com model; aggregating local news rather than trying to generate new content.

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Drew Meyers is right. Facebook is Completely Changing the Internet. Mark Zuckerberg has said that he wants to build the first social media OS and with the F8 release last week, he’s done just that.

To recap. Facebook’s F8 release means anyone can build an application on top of the social network and have it distributed throughout its entire user base. What this means is, Facebook is opening up its platform and instantly giving developers access to their over 20+ million users. And it’s even offering to give them 100% of the advertising and transaction revenue they generate.

Why is Facebook being so generous? Because they know the more things they can offer for people to do, the more time people will hang out on the site (and believe me, it can be addictive), which simply gives them more options to ultimately monetize that traffic.

This is pretty groundbreaking stuff, because it means as a developer you can instantly launch your product to a massive audience. No surprise then to date, more than 70 companies have taken them up on their offer.

Brian Brady argues that MySpace should just buy a number of the new Real Estate 2.0 players. I agree with his rationale – though I doubt it will happen and besides, Facebook has just scooped them.

So, how could some of the Real Estate 2.0 players take advantage of Facebook?

Zillow could allow you to share your home’s Zestimate to your network or your network’s network and allow people to modify the Zestimate based on their local knowledge (a simple yes/no if they think it’s accurate) – Zillow could easily build out the accuracy of their Zestimates in local markets.

Trulia could build out its Voices product so you could ask and answer questions to Trulia experts through the Facebook environment.

vFlyer could let you share your listing flyers to your whole network and have people pass them on to others as well.

Newcomers like Yourstreet and My-Currency are all crowd dependent. They should be angling immediately to integrate their products into Facebook’s user base.

I’m increasingly convinced that social networks are going to be an important arena for agents to focus their marketing (see Marketing Real Estate on Facebook) – but I also think, moving forward, that they’re going to be critically important to driving the success of some of these new Internet based companies as well.

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Owning the conversation around real estate seems to be a big trend these days. Zillow’s trying to do it with their new release (see Zillow Asks What’s For Sale in your Hood?) and now there’s another competitor on the block, so to speak.

YourStreet.com went live this morning. It’s a site for real estate geeks (of whom I proudly count myself one) to get together and talk about what’s happening in their city. The site covers Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, San Francisco and Seattle right now and soon will be adding Boston, Chicago, Dallas, and San Diego into the mix. They hope to be covering the top 50 metro areas in the country by the end of the year. (Hopefully Portland gets in there).

The site was started by a group of CNET veterans and was demo’d at the SFBeta mixer last month; Rafe Needleman mentioned it briefly in his recent post Start-ups in the city. YourStreet uses a bunch of ’social’ features to try and aggregate the local neighborhood knowledge of local residents. Local news articles, forums, blog posts and neighborhood wikis all add to the conversation. Flickr photo feeds from each city liven up the page as well.

Much like mycurrency.com (see My-Currency Wants to Use the Wisest of the Crowds) is trying to do, YourStreet.com is also hoping to tap into the ‘wisdom of the crowds’ to track neighborhood real estate markets. The idea is the people on the ground have an intuitive sense of what’s happening in their neighborhood, so users vote on a scale of 1 to 10 on whether it’s a hot or cool market. The votes are tallied and presented in a color coded graph. Votes are tied to a user’s profile and people can choose to agree or disagree with that opinion, which effectively polices the ratings – I suspect that the more people disagree with a particular ranking, that vote would drop out of the calculation.

I think this is probably the most compelling aspect of YourStreet. It allows anyone to quickly add their voice to the mix in a really fast and easy way. I bet this becomes one of the most popular features on the site. How accurate the Market Monitors actually become is another question altogether.

Real estate professionals are invited to become part of the site and even promote themselves (adding a link to your user profile) as long as you follow the guidelines established in their Good Neighbor Policy.

No sense of how they plan on monetizing the site – not even the ubiquitous Google Ads right now. I think with a few more smart content partnerships (Turnhere’s neighborhood videos for example, or Trulia’s neighborhood data) this site could take on the big Z and turn into a great consumer neighborhood resource.

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