Microsoft discontinues Live Expo for listings
From Inman Blog Network
By Inman News, Tuesday, June 10, 2008.Bookmarking Sites
Microsoft closes down "Craigslist Killer"
by Marlow Harris on 360Digest
Two years ago, seeing the success of Craigslist, Microsoft created Windows Live Expo. Hopes were, it was going to be a "Craigslist Killer." It didn't work out that way, however, and MS announced that the site wil be discontinued at the end of July.
According to a message on its homepage, users can no longer create a new account, post or extend listings, or upgrade listings to "premium." Although Microsoft hasn't commented on the reasoning behind Live Expo's departure, there's speculation that because the service wasn't as well advertised as it could have been, it never took off in the way the company would have liked.
Online classifieds continue to be dominated by Craigslist, and none of the major players have been able to mount a good product to compete successfully. Google has GoogleBase, which hasn't seemed to take off with the real estate crowd, though here in the Pacific Northwest, Windermere and Coldwell Banker Bain has supplied them with a feed. Ebay has Kijiji. There's Backpage, owned by Village Voice Media. Oodle, Vast, LiveDeal, now Overstock and literally hundreds more. None seem to have gained the traction that Craigslist has. Even with the looming threat of elimination of HTML, Craigslist will probably continue to reign supreme.
As an agent, I know that I have very limited patience with manually entering my listings to all of the sites out there. I'd much rather put it on one or two aggregators and call it a day, as I don't have an assistant to post my listings on every single classified Web site. With the MLS, you get your listings posted automatically on every other real estate Web site and my brokerage, Coldwell Banker, is now supplying a feed to Zillow, GoogleBase and Trulia. If I make a Postlets ad, then it gets on Oodle and Lycos and Hot Pads. Manually entering each of my listings to each of these sites is too labor intensive. Though it's noted that each ad to Craigslist must be manually loaded, if it didn't work, we wouldn't do it.
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Submitted by Jerry Hoffman on June 10, 2008 - 4:16pm.
The MLS is like a library. All the books in one place so you can find what you want in one place. How effective would that be if we threw books out on every corner, so anybody passing by might stumble on what they were looking for?
All of these non-real estate entities making money off the efforts of agents should be dropped - prefferably off a very high cliff. Each MLS should handle the disemination of real estate data on behalf of their members ala HAR.com. Then everybody looking for real estate in any given area (from anywhere in the world) will know where to go and get (presumably) everything. We put our data in one place and the place that knows the data best displays it best for everybodies benefit. BTW - if someone is going to make money off our data, shouldn't it be us and the MLS instead of a web based cash cow de jour..
Submitted by Jerry Hoffman on June 10, 2008 - 4:18pm.
NOTE TO SELF: "everybody's"
Submitted by Earl Niemoth on June 11, 2008 - 3:50am.
Manual postings. A ton of work. Time is money. Do you want to be selling and listing, or do you want to do data entry? Not only doing data entry, it is very error prone.
Go to www.RealEstateOnTheInternet.biz, and see how easy it is to maintain your listings on 17 Internet Real Estate sites. They are all enumerated on the home page.
Simply click the "Blast Program" menu item
Submitted by Ralph M on June 11, 2008 - 7:14am.
Another non-real estate company/site bites the dust....How un-expected! Maybe the horoscopes didn't catch this for microsoft?