The real estate blog network Curbed.com — which is already in SF, NY and LA — just took in $1.5 million in financing to add staff and expand to other cities. Among the investors? Nick Denton and Gawker Media. “We’re not just about real estate,” said Curbed Publisher Lockhart Steele. “People come to the site to talk about their neighborhoods and about life in the city.” Of course, this is a perfect platform for local real estate advertisers, especially condos — which is a lucrative market space right now.
Also, Zillow announced today a very innovative way to match advertisers at a granular level with home buyers and sellers. Keep an eye on this, folks.
October 30th, 2007
MySpace announced its first significant design change in four years, and social networking blog Mashable isn’t very polite about it: “In short, most of these changes are way too little, way too late, and reek of too many chefs in the kitchen. While there are plenty of new features for the homepage, they are poorly arranged and will take users plenty of getting used to, especially when there have been zero updates in four years.”
Compare MySpace’s limited progress with Facebook’s amazing transformation. Since News Corp. bought MySpace, we’ve seen very few new features developed for users, but plenty for advertisers and promoters. Facebook is smart to remain independent and retain its singular spirit of user-focused innovation. In the end, guess who will come out ahead?
October 30th, 2007
