Washington Post Chooses Best of Breed over Vanilla Vendors
Online newspaper's real estate offerings still have the canned feel of third party vendorland, an afterthought slapped on by business managers without the luxury of a classified ad sales force, with the implied consent from editors who could care less about real estate coverage. The generic vendor offerings seemed old with none of the interactive features that characterize the Web 2.0 sites.
Washington Post has picked best of 2.0 breed by replacing its current listings search vendor HomeFinder with Trulia and added HomeGain's home valuation tool. HomeGain is now live on WP and any query goes directly to the HomeGain site, an apparent change in the website philosophy of keeping users contained within the site. Trulia will likely implement a white label version for WP similar to their Village Voice offering.
It's refreshing to see media companies adopting the latest iterations of technology instead of falling back on vendors they used ten years ago through inertia.
Pat, I don't think HomeGain was chosen because it is best of breed. Rather it was chosen simply because the Washington Post owns HomeGain's parent company Classified Ventures. If anything I'm surprised it took so long for HomeGain's newspaper owners to exploit its valuation tool; then again newspapers are in such a dire financial situation because they are so slow to react and adapt.
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