Nestoria Blog

In our June Nestoria Interview we are lucky enough to speak with Ivailo Jordanov. Currently Ivailo is founder of retaggr, an online identity system, while simultaneously working on launching a new property portal for the Russian market. Before that he was founder of Zoomf, an innovative, web2.0 UK property portal (and Nestoria partner), and prior to that he was an early team member at eSpotting (now Miva), the company that introduced Europe to paid search. In short, Ivailo has extensive internet (and especially search) experience.

Ivailo, thanks for taking the time from your obviously hectic schedule to speak with us.

1. Please describe the retaggr project and how you see identity on the web evolving.
Retaggr is a service that enables active web users to link all their various online profiles into a single, always-updated, interactive business card that can be attached to virtually any type of content or interaction the user has on the web. Retaggr also provides photo tagging to enabled sites.

As users have more and more online profiles, we created retaggr because we wanted to allow users to put all their online personas in one place.

Identity is becoming more and more important especially because there are multiple places one can interact online and being able to show who they are will add credibility to their contributions. For example if there is a discussion happening on a property blog, it would be useful to be able to easily see which comments come from property professionals and see where else online they interact.

2. How does your experience in search lend itself to online identity?
The guys building the retaggr technology are from a search background and one thing that is common is that what we are building is a high volume high performance system and they do that really well. When you are storing peoples personal details, the performance and the availability of the the system are very important, while it has to cope with growing volumes as more sites become retaggr enabled.

3. What are your thoughts on the developments in the property search sector in the last year?
It is great to see that agents are realizing that their marketing budgets are better spent online, which in turn drives innovation. The experience of finding property online has improved significantly, however it is still very dependent on agents keeping their listings up to date, which is often not the case. New entrants provide a different user experience to the established property portals.

4. What are the challenges you think a vertical search engine for property like Nestoria faces?

1. The property search space is very competitive and the main challenge is to compete for the attention of property hunters with players with significant advertising budgets.
2. If the state of the property market causes agents to cut their advertising budgets, it could have a negative effect on Nestoria’s revenues.
3. The freshness and relevancy of the results. Vertical search engines are dependent on the listings they get from other sites and often the quality of property listings is not great.
4. To keep the interface simple, useful and fast.

Thanks Ivailo. Useful insights from an industry insider. You are absolutely right that keeping the interface simple is a great challenge, one we grapple with all the time. Likewise freshness, a topic we’ve covered in the past, is a continual challenge. We’ll keep doing our best. Meanwhile for those user’s interested in retaggr’s innovative approach to online identity I recommend subscribing to the retaggr blog.

past Nestoria interviews: Salim Mitha, Alex Singleton, and Tom Steinberg.

BTW - for all the hardcore (und deutschsprechende) Nestoria fans - we’ve launched our Nestoria interview series in German over on the Nestoria Deutschland blog