Archive for March, 2008

Single click house buying now live

Published by Ed on March 31, 2008 in New Features. 9 Comments

Ahoy Nestorizalek!

Sorry for our recent silence here on the Nestoria blog but this is definitely a case where good things come to those who wait. We’ve just gone live with a new feature that we think will revolutionise online property search: single click house buying!

After months of development we’re very happy to finally lift the curtain on this one. Here’s a screenshot showing how easy it is to buy a house in Brighton (click to enlarge).

nestoria payments

Many rounds of painstaking usability testing really helped us polish the details, for example, notice how you can jump straight to your shopping cart when you’re ready to check out:

shopping cart

As avid readers of this blog will know we do our best to make things simple. Making the purchase is trivial, just click on the ‘add to cart’ and away you go.

shopping cart close up

The entire process is just a few easy steps:

ecommerce flow

As you would expect there is a complete Twitter and FriendFeed integration, for those that want to grab a house while on the on the run. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to finish the Skype/VOIP voice recognition tie in, but it is in beta test and we hope to go live with that later this week.

No doubt a lot of you are wondering about the technology behind this innovation, and I can tell you it was not easy. Billing opens up all sorts of issues like refunding, gift certificates (so you can buy a house for someone else), and supporting multiple delivery options. Luckily we have been doing fairly well lately, and are saving a bit of money on rent so we’ve finally been able to afford good software rather than relying on our usual unsupported and unprofessional opensource stack.

In closing, a bit of delicious icing on the cake for all our loyal users: anyone who buys more than two houses in a single session in the next day will get a free pack of moo cards with interior shots of their new home.

Enjoy!

We’re hiring. Join us.

Published by Ed on March 19, 2008 in about us and hiring. 0 Comments

Ciao Nestorianos!

We’re on the hunt for some talented and passionate folks from Germany and Italy to join the Nestoria team as we spread our dead simple property searching across the EU. The detailed position description is available on our jobs page on our corporate site.

This is a great chance for someone with minimal experience to join a motivated team building a service that will be used by millions of people.

Please get in touch if you’re the one.

Embeddable House Price Charts

Published by Ed on March 18, 2008 in New Features and tools. 7 Comments

Hail Nestorcrats!

In these chaotic times of stock market ups and downs (good thing my contract stipulates that I be paid in gold bullion), it’s only natural that people are focused on the price of their most valuable asset: their home. A few weeks ago we asked you for feedback regarding the best way to display house price trends over time. Many thanks to those of you who came forward with your helpful suggestions.

Today we’re pleased to announce the newest version of our house price widget is now live. Using the recently released Google Charts API (thanks Google!) we’re able to

nestoria house prices widget

Adding the widget to your website or blog is literally as simple as cut and paste. Do a search on Nestoria for any area in the UK and at the bottom of the page there will be a link to ‘House Prices Widget’. Click on that link and you’ll be shown a page where you can get the chunk of code to cut and paste onto your website. Full details can be found on the house price widget page in our webmaster tools

Indeed, the first examples of the new widget have already been spotted ‘in the wild’. Here’s a screenshot from Lavenderhill.co.uk, a site, as the name suggests, about the Lavender Hill area of South London:

nestoria house price widget on Lavender Hill site

Of course, if you are traditionalist, you’ll be very pleased to know that we continue to support the original house price widget format, as seen here:

nestoria house prices widget

and for those who disagree with our design decisions, you of course have full access to the raw data itself via our API.

We are considering rolling out other widget designs in the future, so please do keep sending us your feedback. Likewise, we’re happy to feature other examples of the widget in the wild. Let us know.

Best of luck to all of you in these uncertain times (hint: buy gold!).

Nestoria Interview - Tom Steinberg - mySociety

Published by Ed on March 17, 2008 in interviews. 3 Comments

This month we have the chance to interview Tom Steinberg, Director of mySociety, the folks behind such innovative sites as TheyWorkForYou (whose governmental data we display on Nestoria) and FixMyStreet. In the same way that we aim to make Nestoria as simple as possible to do one thing: search for property, mySociety aims to build very simple websites that help people engage with their community. Most relevantly to property mySociety recently produced some very innovative and much discussed travel-time maps.

Tom, thanks for speaking with us.

1. Please explain the goals of mySociety.
mySociety is all about building deceptively simple websites which give citizens simple, tangible benefits to the parts of their lives that are concerned with their democracy and their communities. We aim to provide benefits that are as simple and tangible as when Amazon sends you a book, but just in the more nebulous (but highly important) arena of politics, democracy, social capital and so on. We also aim to teach bits of the public and the voluntary sector how they could be spending their money a lot better to help citizens.

2. What the technical challenges you face?
Wow, big question. There are lots but some of the more interesting are:

  1. Attracting audiences with zero marketing budget to things that aren’t as inately ‘fun’ as YouTube videos of cats falling off tables. We do this by working hard on legit SEO, and by making our sites the sorts of things that lots of other people running other sites can make use of, by, for example linking to speeches made in Parliament on TheyWorkForYou, or by encouraging people to write to politicans via WriteToThem.com
  2. One challenge I especially like to work on is generating public good from private desire. One good example of this is FixMyStreet, where people who report problems end up generating a public database about local problems. On the brand new WhatDoTheyKnow.com people use the site because it’s an easy way of getting information they need, personally, but it generates a public database that Google can crawl of what people are looking for, and what the Government is giving them back.
  3. Sometimes we have sheer scale problems. At its peak load ever the No10 petitions site saw 141 people confirm their signatures successfully in one second - more than 10 times the rate that the BBC expects to be able to sign up new people, and all running on just three machines. Most of that is thanks to the lasting genius of our late and much missed colleague Chris Lightfoot, and the loving care of our awesome dev team.

3. How might some of these lessons learned in building simple apps for the mass public be applicable to to the vertical search space?
Perhaps the top lesson we can give anyone who runs a search service on a database that is constantly changing and updating is this - build alerting systems and advertise them aggressively (can you see the advert on this page? - I hope so!). People talk a lot about RSS but if you run such a database and don’t let people sign up for email alerts when a word or phrase or other unique string comes up, then you’re missing a huge number of repeat visitors, as well as failing to serve your audience.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?
Well, as it happens I’ve been using your site a lot in the last week attempting to find somewhere to live (has anyone got a nice 1 bedroom in the East End to let?). It seems to me that you’ve got various challenges:

  1. Persuading your users that they’re on a site that has most of what’s out there to be had. I’d like to see some some of percentage, even if it was a guesstimate of how much of the total property available in the area I’m looking at that’s currently on the market is in front of me. Google has done a great job at making people think that if it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist, so expectations of completeness are very high.
  2. Obtaining good, reasonably priced geodata to power your service. I believe you’ve only got the first part of postcodes, which caused me a bit of a headache first time I used the site. I hope that Nestoria will be amongst the voices calling for improvements in licensing from the Ordnance Survey - it feels as if change is a afoot.
  3. Partnering with companies so that the user experience of what people find is as good as the finding process. Nestoria is almost embarrassingly more usable than most of the sites that supply its data at the moment, which causes some user frustration.

Thanks Tom. Lots of good feedback here. Creating simplicity is deceptively difficult and requires continual fine-tuning. We’ll keep doing our best to encourage open geodata and to partner with sites that value user experience. Likewise, we’ll be opening up more of our data in the very near future. Keep up the great work at mySociety and please extend our thanks to the entire team. Meanwhile we invite all our readers to check out mySociety’s latest community site: GroupsNearYou

past Nestoria interviews: Lelia Ferro, Lloyd Shepherd, Adam Samuel.

Nestoria sponsors SOTM08

Published by Ed on March 14, 2008 in events. 4 Comments

Fellow Nestorfolk!

Some good news. This year we will once again be sponsoring the State of the Map conference. State of the Map is the annual gathering for anyone interested in OpenStreetMap, an open source movement mapping the world. The conference will be the 12th and 13th of July in Limerick, Ireland. Members of the Nestoria team will be both in the audience and speaking.

OSM seems to really picking up speed both in terms of coverage and quality of maps and number of participants. Our most recent experiment with OpenStreetMap data was the creation of a parallel version of both Nestoria Spain and the UK to show the progress of OpenStreetMap. The conference will be a great chance to compare notes, hear some interesting talks, and meet fellow geo-enthusiasts. We hope to see you there.

Network outage

Published by Ed on March 12, 2008 in about us. 0 Comments

Fellow Nestortonians!

Bad news, our server hosting provider has been hit by a network snafu. This unfortunately means Nestoria for the UK and Spain are currently down. We’re hoping to be back online shortly.

Thanks for your patience. We’re as disappointed as you are. We’ll keep you posted. *sigh*

UPDATE: the websites are live again. They were down for about 40min.

More photos anyone?

Published by Ed on March 11, 2008 in New Features and search. 0 Comments

Greetings Nestormaniacs,

Today we rolled out a tiny new feature to make your property searching even easier. In cases where we know it we now let you know if a listing has more photos than just the one we’re showing. See an example in this screen shot:

screenshot of more photos text

It’s all part of our never ending quest to bring you the most relevant search results. As with every tweak to the site, we’re keen to know what you think. Happy house hunting!

Durham Mapping Party

Published by Ed on March 5, 2008 in events and technical. 0 Comments

Hail Nestorlinians!

As you may recall, a few months back we announced our sponsorship of Living with Dragons. Gregory Marler, the man behind the project, is attempting to live without copyrighted maps. An interesting, and entertaining, experiment. He’s slowly but surely mapping Durham using OpenStreetMap; you can follow his progress. To speed things up, a Durham Mapping Party is being organised for the 7th and 8th of June, and we hope many a loyal Nestoria fan will participate.

You can check the progress of the OSM volunteers in Durham and elsewhere in the UK via the experimental OpenStreetMap version of Nestoria. Compare our mainsite version of Durham and the OpenStreetMap version. As you can see there’s still work to be done in Durham. Other recent mapping parties have proven very successful and more and more cities are being mapped in great detail, and I’m sure it will be the same in Durham. Other upcoming mapping events in the UK include Birmingham, Southwest Surrey, and Wales.

Best wishes to all the mappers out there!

Nestoria and Clyde & Forth Press

Published by Ed on March 3, 2008 in partnerships. 0 Comments

Greetings Nestorpeople,

In recent weeks we’ve documented some of our partnerships with traditional media groups like The Independent and Channel4, and we’re very please today to announce another such collaboration. This weekend the first phase of a partnership with Clyde & Forth Press - one of the UK’s leading regional newspaper groups went live. Clyde & Forth has many local newspaper brands all across the UK. Here’s a screenshot of our implementation on the Reading Chronicle:

Reading property search

Other examples include the Windsor & Eton Express and the Bracknell News.

As we hope this string of recent partnerships shows, we’re keen to work together with everyone. If you have an audience and would like to present them with a cutting edge property search in your brand, please get in touch.