The Clozing Seeks to Aggregate Real Estate News
If imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, then the founder of the Clozing definitely has no qualms calling his new site the “Techmeme for Real Estate”.
Launched today by Sellsius blog head Joe Ferrara and his partner Anthony Barba, The Clozing is meant to be “your real estate water cooler”. It aggregates and displays real estate headlines from across the Net. Feeds from various sources are mixed together and displayed as stories break. The site hopes to make money through sponsored posts from advertisers that are highlighted on the right of the mix.
I love the idea personally. Techmeme remains one of the few sites I make a habit of monitoring throughout the day. Having a source of great real estate related links could be a really useful outpost to head to daily.
Nevertheless I have a few minor quibbles and suggestions for the Clozing on launch day.
The related stories algorithm seems to need some tweaking, as many of the headlines seemed to draw in random discussions. A story on IDX on Agentgenius.com was somehow linked to an announcement on Rismedia about a Green Resource website, for example.
For the Clozing to be truly useful, the relevance of the supporting discussions must remain high, at the risk of alienating the users. Given a generous allowance for launch day bugs, the Clozing ought to fix this quickly – else run the risk of going the way of RealEstateVoices.com – a much ballyhoo’d Digg clone that launched in 2006 and fizzled quickly.
Also – I wonder how truly safe it is to rely on a single source of authority (blog links) these days, given that much of the online discussion has moved quickly onto new platforms. News is increasingly shared and disseminated via social networks like Twitter so finding the fast moving conversations and links that are shared via those tools (like http://tweetmeme.com/) will be a must-have feature for the Clozing.
All in all though – it’s a great start and a nice addition to my daily bookmarks.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
Make sure to follow Inman News on Twitter too!
Drew Meyers | May 11, 2009 | Reply
There are still discussions going on on blogs, but, every week, I’m seeing more and more of those discussions moving over to twitter. It will be hard to capture all those discussions at TheClozing…but I’m a fan of the service nonetheless as you are. It’s something I’ve wanted to see for over a year; glad the idea is finally a reality.
Joseph Ferrara | May 11, 2009 | Reply
I totally agree with your review, Joel (as I did with Drew’s). The challenge of marrying current mainstream media news to social media news in a useful way is one I enjoy tackling.
While I hope to break my dependency on my feedreader with stops at theclozing, I realize many real estate agents and consumers do not even use a feedreader, making the site an easy way for them to get a quick look at what’s happening.
We hope to include other social media as we move forward. But we want to establish a good baseline before building out.
Thanks for taking a look, Joel.
hash | May 11, 2009 | Reply
I like it too, as I’m a big fan of Techmeme as well. However, I hope they get rid of the numbers next to the title, they’re just distracting and server no real purpose.
Kevin Schmidtchen | May 11, 2009 | Reply
This is a pretty interesting idea and might work to some level. There is so much info out there these days that I still think people are comfortable getting their info from different sources. If they can find out a way to organize this, I think it works. My first look is simply an impression of Good Idea but a little confusing on combining it all and making news stories relevant to each other.
Good luck
Mike Gallagher | May 12, 2009 | Reply
I like the site and I would probably read it, but it needs an RSS feed so I can add it to iGoogle. That’s how I found TFRM, and I catch up on your columns every week.
If theclozing.com wants me to read their content they need to add this feature.
Seems like an obvious thing to do, so maybe it’s coming soon…?
Jason Pomerantz | May 12, 2009 | Reply
It lacks editorial direction. The problem is that the people who run it, have no idea about real estate language, so they post garbage there and if I have to sift through garbage to get my daily real estate dose, then I rather sift through relevant stuff. The feeds are not relevant at all. It needs direction. It needs some sort of a mission, not just a feed.
Home Loans in Florida | May 21, 2009 | Reply
The Clozing represents a valiant effort to do what most of us can’t – keep tabs on the bulk of what’s really going on in Real Estate via Social Media outlets. Joe Hall, founder of WhosTalkin.com first turned me on to the value of aggregating this type of information. I look forward to following all that happens on The Clozing!
Investment Property Rumours | May 26, 2009 | Reply
It will be interesting to see the results, many have tried to create aggregators, most with some success, the only downside is when they try to charge subscriptions for them as a opposed to stick with the main reason fo rdesigning them, traffic!
Joseph Ferrara | Jun 2, 2009 | Reply
Thanks for the comments, folks. All valid points.
It is inevitable that a certain amount of noise (crap) comes out of virtually all media channels– online and offline– aggregated or not. We each do our own filtering because, as they say, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.
The goal of theclozing is to find the best mix of reliable RE news sources, give it to readers fast and easy, and, hopefully, decrease the amount of filtering a reader has to endure. All links go to the original sources.
The RSS feed is missing bc. we are doing a test. We show 75% + return visitors to the site right now.