Fellow Nestordelphians!
Many thanks for all your cards and presents. We’ve been overwhelmed here at the new Nestoria HQ with well wishes from our blog readers as we approach a momentous date: the three year anniversary of the launch of Nestoria. It was a different, much simpler time back then when Ahmed’s first post (that’s right – there was electronic communication pre-twitter) laid out our goal: We aim to provide you with the most relevant property listings, contained within an incredibly easy to use, feature packed interface! And that’s the model we’ve stayed true to. I smile when I think of how we started out. We used to run the entire site, which by the way only had listings for London (but then again, as I’ve always said, it’s your own fault if you venture outside zone 2) on a used Commodore 64 that we had rigged together to run via a hand crank (we couldn’t afford electricity). Loading the data via punchcards led to no end of vicious paper cuts (seriously, how can a wound so small hurt so much?), and our office was an old army tent strung up in Hyde Park. Well things have moved on, we now offer Nestoria in four countries (you can now search for Wohnungen in Hamburg, casas en alquiler en Sevilla, and immobili in vendita a Livorno on Nestoria), we’ve earned the trust of many partners, and we’re very proud of having helped thousands of people find their next home simply and easily. Still though, if you look at our homepage, it’s tempting to say nothing has changed. But that’s the nature of the search engine game – the focus remains on continual fine tuning (like our recent work on deduplication) rather than dramatic new changes. And rest assured that’s the model we’ll continue to pursue going forward. Still we do manage to find time for occasional tinkering with some radical (radical in the sense of a Californian surfer describing something cool) new ideas. If you haven’t yet, please stop by Lokku Labs where we often try out new ideas (we’re hoping for a new announcement later this week) and new technologies. Please let us know what you’d like to see from Nestoria in the coming years. As always, we welcome your feedback. At this point it’s fitting to thank all the partners who believed in us, the open-source communities on whom we’ve depended so much, and most of all the loyal users who always push us to be better. The only person I’d like to explicitly anti-thank is the asshole landlord who kicked us out of our Soho office where we were just down the street from the burrito shop. Shame on you!
Lokku team members at our recent office warming party
