Auston Bunsen

Very recently, a mashup I created, called iZillow was featured in the New York Times. A few people had asked me how I pulled it off. I thought it would be cool if I shared the story of how it happened on the net, mainly because it was a fluke.

Here is how the idea found its way from my head to the New York Times[link to story]:

I have always found Zillow to be a very compelling web application. The informational advantage that Real Estate agents used to have has shrunk to almost zero. I love the empowerment provided by Zillow, and the potential it has for businesses is tremendous, dare I say.

But Zillow’s technology had been stuck on the desktop web for so long. Then came Zillow’s “mobile” version. It used SMS as an interface…. Pfft! What consumer would use SMS to find the value of a home on the run!?

I wanted to free up Zillow, and make it truly mobile. But how? What device would give the best user experience? Microsoft’s mobile Internet Explorer did not have ajax support and provides menial Javascript support at best, Google’s Android platform hadn’t launched yet & BlackBerry’s browser support is, to put it nicely, a text reader. I needed something breathtaking, naturally, I went with the iPhone. Mobile Safari is a powerful browser with almost no limits. I was set, now I just needed to get a hold of Zillow’s technology and port it over.

I had recently completed a front-end framework for creating iPhone applications (a la Joe Hewitt), called Safire. It’s just a basic library of JS/CSS/HTML & Images, give it a try if you want. It was perfect for what I was doing with iZillow. Plus, I needed a use case for Safire.

On the backend, I first thought I would have to scrape data from Zillow.com, and what a better way to do that then for free? I decided I would use Google’s new cloud computing project, Google App Engine. I had never used Python before, so the task seemed a little daunting. I figured at most it would take me a week to build a scraper.

After some research though, it turns out Zillow has a great API. I opted for that and went forward. I decided since it had an API and I am familiar with the DOM, why not just cut my teeth on Python?

I cranked the entire app out in 8 hours. I now had Zillow on the iPhone. Not bad!

Now I had to get some coverage! I was proud of taking Zillow mobile. I e-mailed some of the guys I know from TechCrunch. They weren’t exactly into it, and provided me with a polite rejection. I started doing a few google searches to see who might be interested in covering something like this, I came upon The Future of Real Estate, a great blog dedicated to covering the newest of new in all aspects of real estate. They were kind enough to post a positive review of the application, which sparked a bunch of smaller posts and twitters.

It turned out that some people from Zillow read The Future of Real Estate and were actually very impressed by what I had created! They didn’t want to sue me or anything, so naturally I was esctatic.

As a way to augment traffic I submitted it to the Google App Engine directory and received some rave reviews, which you can see here.

Then I realized I should try to get featured on Apple.com because at that time the main way to use apps was via Mobile Safari. I submitted it to iPhone web apps directory and it caused a HUGE spike in traffic (see the big spike around May 19th below?) with a nice reverberation of links and coverage around the web into smaller iphone web app directories.

That’s where John Markoff of the New York Times found it, he never contacted me for comment, or anything like that, but after I was notified (by Drew from Zillow) that iZillow was in the NY Times (and that Zillow wanted me to make it clear that there was no association between iZillow and Zillow), I contacted John and asked him how he found my app and why he featured it. He was polite enough to say:

“ I was compelled to feature it because it was one of the simplest and clearest UIs I ran across!“

So in the end I didn’t really do much to get featured except look for users, and I never really expected much out of it, but now iZillow has about 150-250 daily users and I can say “I’ve had my work featured in the New York Times!”