What a great Superbowl. This is one year where the game definitely out-shined the commercials. Still, I did have a couple favorite ads. Shaq’s Vitiman Water add was pretty funny, and the E-trade baby was very well done. I’m a sucker for Carmen Electra, so the Ice Breakers commercial was another highlight.

But among the razzle dazzle of nationally known brands, I want to give a shout out to fellow member of the RE.net that quietly made a statement of their capabilities.

The United Way ran a ten second animated spot to show how people can support their fitness programs by texting “FIT” to “864833″ a.k.a. “UNITED“. A $5.00 charge is reflected on your phone bill, $4.50 of it going to the United Way.

Establishing a mobile channel that can handle the United Way’s fund raising efforts on the biggest stage in the world, is a pretty big deal. The company behind it is Mobile Accord. It’s sister company is House Front.

I think mobile applications will play an ever larger role in how housing professionals do business. Housefront is definitely positioned to play an important role in this new market. Kudos!

The entire premiss of REMBEX is to find RE bloggers, get them to share their experiences, and encourage other RE professionals to take on blogging themselves. For this reason, BlogRush, the latest social networking widget that’s sweeping the blogosphere is perfect for this blog. RBF is all about other bloggers, and displaying headlines form related blogs makes good sense. I also think it’s great that all sorts of other RE bloggers are displaying this widget, but not for any reasons that would be helpful to them.

I’ve been surfing BlogRush all week. I’m always on the prowl for new (to me) RE blogs to ad to the REMBEX search engine. So when I see an unfamiliar name listed in my little BlogRush widget, I’m off to check it out. Then, when I see a new name in their widget, well away I go again, and again, and again. What fun. I’ve found about 30 new blogs surfing BlogRush this week. As the week progressed, I came across the many popular RE blogs that are displaying BlogRush (BloodHound, Geek Estate, RE Revealed, Transparent Real Estate, and Phoenix Real Estate Guy) with greater, and greater regularity.Continue Reading

I finally got around to joining Facebook last night. It’s a social networking site with aspects of MySpace & LinkIn. The real estate industry is becoming a strong adoptor, and there are several industry specific widgets and tools to enhance the Facebook experience.

In addition, lot’s of RE Bloggers are connecting here. Jay Thompson (interview) has set up a Facebook Real Estate Bloggers Group. There’s already about 100 members and it includes a discussion forum for bloggers to swap ideas. Very Cool!

Hat tip to Dave Smith of Real Estate Blog Labs for this cool little WordPress Plugin. It was exactly the tool I needed. Now, anyone who leaves comments on this blog will receive a back-link that Google will follow. There’s a one day probation for all comments so I can discard any comment spam.