estatecreate blog

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After 7 days, 55 followers, following 120 people, 50 updates and more time than I will ever admit to, I just could not take it any longer, so I deleted my account. Twitter.com/HPY is no more.

Last week Twitter dominated my life. If I wasn’t checking Lance Armstrong‘s latest musings from the tour down under (twitter.com/lancearmstrong), or stalking Dragons (which turned out to be fake), I would be constantly interrupting my thought process by checking out the latest conversation being held by some people I am vaguely connected to.

I started the week using www.twitter.com, by Wednesday I had downloaded Power Twitter, a firefox plugin, by Friday I had downloaded Tweetdeck, allowing me to have 3 columns of different groups of mindless consciousness streaming down my page, with a desk top reminder flashing at me just in case I missed a tweet.

Finally the weekend arrived. Respite from this constant pull was in sight. But no. I still had a nagging desire to just have a quick peep to see what was going on. We had some friends over for dinner. Once they had headed home my wife and I stayed up chatting. I confessed about my new relationship with 120 people that I hardly new. I showed her what I had been up to. Relief. Sharing was half the battle. She laughed. “It’s pathetic, what are all these people doing?”. I showed her more, we laughed together this time. I suddenly had an urge to delete my account. The wine definitely helped. Options, Set up, Account, DELETE. Phew. A wave of relief swept over me.

Reading this you may be thinking that the problem here is not Twitter, it is how I was using it. I can not deny that my character is particularly susceptible to be overrun by something like Twitter, but, I could not help but notice that I was not the only one that Twitter had got a grip on. That is why it works so well – it sucks people in, as they feel the need to be part of the constant stream of conversation.

So, did I learn much during my week on Twitter? Did I influence anyone? I don’t think I learnt anything that I would not have picked up elsewhere. I read some blog posts an hour or two before I would have picked them up. However, a few people did read this blog that otherwise would not have done. That is why I signed up – we are launching soon, and we are starting to get our communicating channels in place.

We will use Twitter, but when we do we will need some firm objectives and someone who can handle being plugged in to 100s of people without getting sucked in.

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Image by Steve Punter via Flickr

As Robert Peston points out on his blog, the UK is currently caught in a vicious cycle.

UK banks owe billions to overseas lenders; lenders confidence in the UK banks is wavering increasing the likelihood of them demanding their money back; this is causing the value of sterling to fall, as the government, already massively in debt, is effectively guaranteeing repayment; sterling’s fall is in turn increasing the value of the bank/governments’ debts further reducing confidence in the banks and the UK.

Having an independent currency was supposed to have the benefit of allowing gradual devaluation to boost international competitiveness. Unfortunately as we are so in debt to the rest of the world, it seems to be driving us into a potentially nasty scenario where the UK can not pay its debts. Think Russia in the 1990s or Argentina in the early 2000s. Default leads to a sudden sharp fall in the value of the currency which then leads to massive inflation, as the price of imported goods and services soar. This feeds through to wage demands and all the knock on effects of being caught in an inflationary economy.

How long will it be until Gordon is on the phone to the IMF? Would this have happened if we were part of the Euro?

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15th September, 2009 – The Web Marketing Association has named estatecreate the winner of their 2009 Outstanding Website in their Real Estate Category.

The judging was based on the following categories: design, innovation, content, technology, interactivity, copywriting and ease of use. estatecreate received a score of over 9/10 in every category. One of the judges noted: “The demo truly sets it apart”.

estatecreate WebAward Scores

Henry Yates, estatecreate Chief Executive, said: “I am very pleased that the team’s hard work has been recognised by winning this award. We are in good company as Zillow won the same award last year.”
estatecreate is a new tool for estate agents to showcase a vendor’s home with a standalone website for their property with its own domain name – the 21st century glossy property brochure for the web. You can see an example website here: http://dovehousestreet.com/

The service is very easy to use – estatecreate takes a feed of data from each branch and the agent can then easily add content and publish to a domain name of their choice. You can see a product demo here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mIGk-9Bxp4Q

The Web Marketing Association was founded in 1997 with the intent to improve industry standards. Over the years, the recipients have created a benchmark for future Internet marketers and professionals around the world. This year, more than 45 countries participated.

estatecreate was founded by Henry Yates and is the first company to offer this service to estate agents in the UK. Yates is an experienced entrepreneur who has previously co- founded and sold two businesses, Face, the research and planning agency (www.facegroup.co.uk, sold to Cello PLC) and Univillage.com, the social network for students (sold to www.sub.tv).
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More information on the WebAwards and estatecreate’s entry here: http://www.webaward.org/winner.asp?eid=12565.