Nestoria Blog

Greetings members of the Nestolese Empire,

If, like us, you spend a fair percentage of your time on the internet, you’ve been bombarded with invitations to join the social networking site Facebook recently. The site, originally started for US college students, seems to have leapt the Atlantic in a big way over the last year, with more and more Brits using the service.

Last month Facebook announced Platform, which allows anyone to build their own application within Facebook. The internet has been abuzz with commentary about why this is an amazing feat and a shrewd business move.

As keen API users and creators, we were of course intrigued. We liked what we saw and last week we whipped up the Nestoria Flat Search application, as a way to search for property within Facebook.

Why on earth would you want to use Facebook to search for your next home instead of coming to Nestoria directly? A few reasons. First of all, you get instant access to the same great relevantly sorted database of houses and flats to buy and rent that you would find on Nestoria. Secondly, it’s easy to share results with your friends (see screenshot below), which is ideal for flatsharers. Finally, if you want, when you do a search what you searched for is shown on your profile page. This means your friends can know you’re hunting for a new house or flat, and may be able to offer advice.

That being said, there’s as yet no good way to implement the rich map experience we offer on Nestoria into the Facebook platform. No doubt the Facebookers are hard at work on continually making Platform better, and we’ll work to improve the experience in the coming months.

Some screenshots for those of you who haven’t yet taken the FB plunge:

Nestoria results in Facebook:

An example of sharing a listing with a friend:

Please add the application, give it a try, and let us know what you think. We’ve also set up the Nestoria Users Group in Facebook as another channel for property searchers to let us know what they think of our efforts to make Nestoria the easiest way to find property in the UK.

If Facebook just isn’t your thing please remember that we also offer a full arsenal of other search tools.

In closing, a bit of thanks. In getting this out so quickly we had the pleasure of working with Techlightenment (the same folks behind personal contact form service Contactify). I can highly recommend their help if you’re looking to have a Facebook app built quickly.

Happy facebooking!