After many late nights over the last week, we completed our latest round of computer system upgrades. The biggest part of the recent upgrade was the addition of a new storage server. This new storage server will enable us to add storage as needed without having to reboot our servers. Now that this is behind us, we can be focused on adding support for more Marketplaces, more Widgets, and other cool marketing tools.

Our members have always been excited about our Widgets because they’re an easy and effective way to increase traffic to their Profile and Listings, but we realized that there was room for improvement. In the prior release, Widgets could either display all of your active listings or just one of them. So we decided enough is enough and, a few weeks ago, rolled out some major enhancements to our Widgets. Now, when you create a Widget, you can:

In other words, we’ve given you more control over the content of your vFlyer Widgets. For example, if you wanted to highlight your listings from a particular subdivision, you could create a Widget that displayed just those listings. Or, if you had both rental and for sale listings in the same account, you could create a separate Widget for each. Or, if you wanted to include a non-vFlyer web page in one of your Widgets, you could do that too.

Creating a List allows you to decide which listings to show in a particular widget. A List works in the same way as a music playlist; you choose the items for the list, just as you would choose the songs for a playlist. When you create a Multi-item Widget, you simply choose the List you want to use for that Widget.

To include content not hosted by vFlyer in a Widget, use a Teaser. A Teaser is an enhanced link designed for use in vFlyer Widgets. Each Teaser requires a title and a URL, where the link in the Teaser will take viewers. Additionally, you can add a price and summary information and upload photos to your Teasers. You can then add Teasers to your Lists just as you would add Flyers.

We’re thrilled to be allowing our users to integrate externally-hosted web content into their Widgets and decide which of their Flyers and Teasers to put in their widgets. We hope that you all take advantage of these great new features!

We recently completed an extensive review of all the widgets we offer and made a number of changes and fixes that improve the look and performance of the Flash version of those widgets. The Flash version (as opposed to the Javascript version, which we also generate for each widget) is the one most compatible with the largest number of websites. Changes we made include a streamlining of the contact information and photo and logos on Basic Gallery and Basic Flyer widgets; the removal of Price and Location labels when those fields have no values in them; a better display of summary information for each listing; improved alignment of the widget title and flyer titles on the vertical Recent Listings widget; and improvement of the scrolling function on the premium Sliding Gallery widget. Here are a few examples:

Widgets are an effective and (best of all) easy way to create more exposure of your listings because you can easily embed the HTML code for the widget in your website, blog, and/or social network profile.  These improvements we made should give vFlyer users all the more incentive to configure widgets and put them on those sites!

Many of you have probably noticed changes to your vFlyer account homepage since Thursday morning. We did an overhaul of the account homepage and made it into a dashboard where you can access the Craigslist HTML for any of your flyers, email and print any of your flyers, access the HTML for any widgets you’ve created, and more. You can think of your account homepage as a kind of “mission control” for your vFlyer account, which is how it should be! Now you no longer need to go through multiple steps to get the Craigslist HTML for a flyer, track the activity of a flyer, or do other flyer-related tasks – it’s all right in front of you when you log in to your account.

We hope this makes using vFlyer even easier. If you have feedback for us on the new dashboard, let us know.

As an online seller looking at widgets and their potential role on your blog or website, it is helpful for you to examine them in light of three important and related business drivers:

• Traffic generation: For an online sellers, the direct or indirect purpose of blog or website is attract potential customers. This is done by generating traffic. There are many components to generating traffic and widgets can definitely impact some of them.
• Stickiness: This involves creating a online property that end-users (prospective clients) spend a lot of time on or visit frequently. Stickiness can be creating a number of different ways including having unique and enticing content, providing value and functionality to end-users, and creating a strong sense of community that gets people to come back. Widgets can be used to enable or accelerate some of these strategies.
• Revenue generation: This is the logical end-goal for most online sellers. Most sellers would like to see their investment of time, energy and money in building a blog generate some ROI (Return on Investment)

Now let’s examine how different categories of widgets can help enable or accelerate some of these business objectives and drivers.

Business Widgets
These widgets help you promote your core business objectives such as listing property and inventory for sale or actually allowing you to do transactions through your site. These are designed to advertise and promote your business products or services with a goal of revenue generation.

• Listings: vFlyer (Listing Widgets)
• Transaction: Paypal

Communication Widgets
These widgets allow end-users to more effectively communication with you. When you have a direct or indirect business object behind your site, this is extremely important, since communication is directly related to lead and revenue generation.

• Instant Messaging: Plugoo, Meebo
• Voice/Voicemail: Jangl, Jaxtr, SnapVine
• SMS: txtDrop

Media Widgets
These widgets enable the display, distribution and sharing of rich media such video (interviews, walk-throughts, videocasts, i.e.) and audio (podcasts, i.e.). When used correctly that can be a source of both traffic generation and stickiness.

• Video: YouTube, WellcomeMat
• Audio: Odeo

Application Widgets
These widgets add end-user utility and functionality to your blog or website. If they create enough unique value, they too can be a source of stickiness.

• Analytic and Valuation Information: Altos Research (AltosCharts), Trulia (TurliaStats), Zillow
• Calculators: vFlyer (Mortgage Calculator)
• Floor Plans: Mapwing
• Maps: Trulia (TruliaMaps)
• RSS and Email: Feedburner, Technorati, WidgetBox (Blidgets)

Community Widgets
These widgets allow you to build a sense of community and interest on your site. Fundamentally, community widgets function both as traffic drivers and a source of stickiness since they encourage people to visit and stay on your site. Some communicate who else has visited (or is visiting) your blog, while others focus on your sites popularity or traffic stats or what you are currently doing.

• Social Networking: MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog
• Presence: Twitter
• Statistics: Technorati, Who’s.Amung.Us

Self-Expression and Profile Widgets
These widgets fall into the bling and information category! They add can uniqueness and a sense of personality to your blog or simply communicate business or personal information about yourself. These probably have the least impact on the drivers we have discussed.

• Avatars: Meez
• Profiles: Linkedin, Facebook

Administrative Widgets
Most administrative widgets are not end-user facing. They allow the owner of the blog or website to manage, improve or performance administrative tasks such as reducing spam, improving performance, tracking users, generating traffic, and improving SEO (search engine optimization). Most of these directly or indirectly focus on generating traffic and reducing cost (with relates to increasing revenue). SEO, for example, generates traffic. Understanding traffic stats can help you improve traffic. Translation widgets can lead to increased traffic. Most of these are specific to the blogging platforms (such as Wordpress, Moveable Text, TypePad).

Widget Resources
There are a number of sites that are marketplaces for widgets for online sellers

• WidgetBox – Directory of widgets
• HousingWidgets – Real estate widgets

I have to run to my Blogger Connect panel so I will update this post when I get back!

A couple of days ago I talked about the importance of high conversion rates and promised to share some points on improving your conversion rate in general and more specifically using flyers.

Two weeks ago, I blogged about how to use post flyers on eBay. Since then I have received a few emails from users asking me if they can also embed vFlyer widgets on eBay to promote their store “inventory” using a gallery widget. I decided to add just such a widget to my latest eBay posting to demonstrate. You can use the same process to embed widgets in eBay as you do to embed flyers! Simply cut and paste the widget HTML code at the bottom of the Description text box (make sure the HTML tab is selected) – Here is an example.

Premium Widgets are similar to existing Standard Widgets but can only be accessed by subscribers – another great reason to upgrade your account if you haven’t done so yet. A vFlyer Starter account gives you access to premium features such as premium widgets and themes, no advertising, bulk upload, more flyers and video for as little as $9.95/month.

The first of these is a gallery slider widget. To see how it works mouse over the main picture or one of the thumbnails at the bottom. You can also pause the slideshow or advance to the next or previous slides.

The second gallery premium widget is abanner gallery widget. This 728px x 90px widget conforms to the standard leaderboard IAB (Internet Advertising Bureau) ad unit was designed to be used a flash banner or banner ad at the top of your page.

Because of its size it doesn’t quite fit my blog post but you can use the scroll bar to see what it looks like. Mousing over an item, removes the transparent flap and pauses the slideshow!

You can find premium widgets by creating a widget and then scrolling to the bottom of the style list below and looking for the premium icon :

It has been a busy two weeks for Trulia, one of our good distribution network partners. Last week, Trulia moved out of Beta (Pete Flint, Trulia’s President and CEO, made the prediction at our Real Estate 2.0 dinner earlier this year) and announced two great new services: Trulia Voices – an interactive real estate question-and-answer service, and HousingWidgets – a central directory of real estate widgets. Yesterday the company announced Series C funding lead by one of Silicon Valley’s best known venture capital (VC) firms – Sequoia Capital! Congrats to Pete and the team at Trulia.

For industry watchers, I think it’s safe for me to make the following conclusions:

Community is Where its at!
Real estate players are moving quickly to build communities and capture market through “accelerating” community-building. Here is why:

• Community is hard to build, and its hard to start an online conversation – but “break the ice” by allowing people to ask and answer questions (something there is no shortage of) and “viola” you have a “instant” conversation which hopefully leads to community or at least better community. ActiveRain (Q&A), LinkedIn (Answers), and Zillow (Home Q&A) have all taken a similar path to help build or enhance their communities.
• Overlay community with commerce and you’ve got a winner! The next step in rolling out community is enabling some form of commercial activity. Whether its placing ads or buying services, the process is akin to building a stadium: Build it and they will come – and then they’ll stick around and buy something! But the trick is to build community first, then introduce commerce. Pete is super smart guy so I am sure Trulia has some interesting things in the works!

Widgets Rule!
HousingWidgets is a great idea since it provides a directory of real estate specific widgets. If you are hungry for more widgets, you may also want to check out the real estate category on WidgetBox as well. Here is why people love widgets and why widget will inherit the earth:

• Widget add functionality and interactivity to your site. Almost everyone has a blog or a website today! Widgets give bloggers and site owners a quick and easy way to add interactive and interesting content to their site! (Okay, maybe not everyone, but many people). Companies like Trulia and vFlyer have a growing number of widgets aimed at online sellers and real estate agents in particular. (Examples: vFlyer Widget, Trulia Widgets)
• Widgets let you take it with you. Widgets, like vFlyer’s commerce widgets, let you take your listings, inventory and other important information with you! That means you can embed the same widgets on your blog, your social network and your website, at the same time, driving people the the same listings or content.

The list of speakers for InmanNew’s Real Estate Connect SF 2007 conference have just been posted. Both Oliver and myself are slated to speak at the conference. I am speaking on August 1 at 8am in the morning: 

Wednesday, August 1, 8:00 a.m. – 8:45 a.m.
New Technologies to Enhance your Website: APIs, Widgets and More

and Oliver will be speaking on the same day at 1pm:

Wednesday, August 1, 1:00 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Pump Up the Volume with Widgets, Blidgets and Other Doo-Dads

If you are going to be at the show, be sure to stop by and say hi. We always love to meet with and hear from our customers!

We released a version of our Commerce Widgets on WidgetBox last week and were featured this week.

WidgetBox is an open web widget marketplace and syndication platform – essentially a directory of web widgets. You can find two version of our popular listing widget (Basic and Mini Gallery), as well as a handy little mortgage calculator, one of the many upcoming “sellers tools” from our labs division. Be on the look out for other new and exciting widgets from vFlyer as well as vflyer content and support for other widget and gadget platforms.

It is indeed a sunny day for many real estate professionals. ActiveRain, the leading social networking and blogging service for real estate professionals, now allows you to embed widgets directly into your blog posts! Matt Heaton, President and CEO of ActiveRain, told me yesterday that their new release (which came out today) would indeed support multimedia. This morning I was able to embed a vFlyer Commerce Widget on our ActiveRain blog (Example)!

Note: ActiveRain users – Please follow the instructions as there is small kink in the process that will be ironed out in this evenings release!

Now online sellers can embed their galleries and flyers as widgets on their blogs, websites, social networking sites or directly on marketplaces such as eBay.  We have the beta for our first series of commerce widgets.

The widget beta is open to all vFlyer users. Simply log into your account and you will notice the addition of a Widget tab.  Just like flyers, you can create widgets using the drop down at the bottom of the page. There are currently two (2) types of widgets: gallery widgets (which show the entire contents of your gallery) and flyer widgets (which show all the information pictures associated with a single flyer). We will be announcing additional widget types. In the Widget Editor you will be able to pick a widget style, customize it and then generate the HTML code to embed it in your site or blog.

For more about Commerce Widgets – click here
For more about embedding commerce widgets on other sites - click here.