Guest: Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Guest: Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Guest: DG Christensen - Zillow
Guest: Randy Puttick - Zillow
Guest: Drew Meyers - Zillow
Guest: Sarah Mann - Zillow
Guest: Buzz Bruggeman
Host: Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, who are you guys?
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
We're at the Zillow offices. My name is Bill Nordwall, and I'm a User and Experience Developer HTML, CSS, Java Script.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Awesome.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I'm Fred Sadaghiani, I'm a Java Developer, working on website.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Okay.
DG Christensen - Zillow
I am DG Christensen, another Java Dev.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
Randy Puttick and I'm a kind of an everything dev; I've worked on C++ and Java recently.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Also in the room is?
Drew Meyers - Zillow
Drew Meyers, I'm on the business side. I do blogging and a little bit of everything else.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
All right.
Sarah Mann - Zillow
I'm Sarah Mann, I'm on the PR side and just starting to do a little bit of blogging and learning.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
See, whenever developers get on video camera, there is always a PR person, because developers tell the truth, isn't that true? -- you can tell me where the edges are on the site -- and then there's Buzz Bruggeman.
Buzz Bruggeman
A camera monkey.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Camera monkey, he's given me a ride around. So, tell me about what it's like to work here. It's been a year, and you guys have been expanding crazily fast; I mean, there's 125 people working here, 100-and-something people working here?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Over 100.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How long have you guys been here working and stuff?
DG Christensen - Zillow
I've been here for four months.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Four months.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I've been here a year and change.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
We started on the same day.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah, Bill and I started on the same day.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And what did you guys do before you came here?
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
I was doing Web Dev for Washington Mutual. They're all on vegan platform, so this is a huge change for me. Good one, though.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Well, I've got to show you what's out here. The offices here -- these are by far the best startup corporate offices I've been in. I don't know if too many other big company offices -- you guys have better views here than Bill Gates' office does, I'll tell you that. I got a tour in how each pod or each cul-de-sac around the offices has different themes.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
Those are the nice floor you're on, we're from the dungeons down below.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
You keep the developers on the bad floor.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
There's a mixture, but most of us are there.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
See, this is what I'm saying. The developers tell the truth. I know they really do.
Sarah Mann - Zillow
I didn't know there was the 41st floor. I just didn't...
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Well, they're gutting it. They're rebuilding it.
Sarah Mann - Zillow
Yeah.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, tell me about what you guys do. You used Java to build Zillow?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah, we work with Java and there are some C++ applications, as Randy was talking, it's kind of what the use case demands, we're trying to put the right solution for the problem.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How does building a website or -- because that's really what you're building, how's that different today then it was in 1994? I have some ideas, but you guys can probably tell me a little bit more.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Well obviously today from my standpoint, from my perspective, Web Development is standards based, we use tools like Standard XHTML, CSS, Standard Java Script, taking advantage...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That's on the front end, the display and...
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
The front end, right, yeah, which is before it was kind of the Wild West of '99, where it was lots of nested tables of HTML and lots of spacer gifs and things like that.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I remember those days.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Some sites are still like that.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
That's true. Yeah, so I mean from my perspective that's what's changed and it's definitely for the better, and it allows development to happen a lot quicker, it's much more flexible, especially for these guys.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Today we have a real separation of the content of the site and the design o the site, thanks to CSS, so you work on the CSS files?
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Right, I architect and build the CSS files, and I take care of the structure of the HTML, and then do some Java Script here, sometime I work there, but a lot of it is these guys. There's all sorts of things to do on the front end like Micro Formats for example.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah, I've my Micro Format shirt on.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Yeah exactly, which is kind of taken the place of the W3C as kind of the standard center of what we want to do from the front end, because we can have a Micro Format for an address, so that's kind of like an API of sorts for the front end. So there's a lot of really cool and exciting things going on with front end development that we try to keep on the front edge of doing.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What about the back-end, how is that? I remember when I first started website development, we had one slow server, and I have feeling that's not how Zillow runs on the back-end. If you gave me a tour of your data centers, what would it be like?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
We haven't actually got to see them. Somebody else is taking care of that. But in terms of like the difference between websites today and those in 1994, they're working on scales of -- auras of magnitude bigger, I mean in terms of amount of data we deal with, the types of features that we have to support. If you had a website back then, it did one thing and it probably didn't do it very well, but today if you look at all the websites that are around, they all have powerful search capabilities, they have tons and tons of data, there's tons of data to be mined and there's tons of interesting problems that they'll have around them and we deal with a lot of those here.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Do you have -- when you're developing the site, do you have any concept of how many machines it gets deployed on, or are you sure running at a more abstract label?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
No, no you're actually hands on and so operators, well OP's people will tell you how much capacity do you think this needs, and we'll stress different applications and actually figure out, get concrete numbers to figure out how much hardware we need.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Now, the CFO here told me that they'd planned for about a million people to visit the site by the this date, and I think he said three and a half million people have actually shown up already, so what does that do to your planning when you guess wrong, and you say, oh, we only need this much capacity and then three times that shows up?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Right, right. I think we're lucky...
Robert Scoble - Scoble Show
A lot of weekend scrambling...
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I think we were lucky. There was some, there was some. I think right when we launched we had that -- we had the very well-known problem where our site went down, and people thought that we planned it intentionally for us to like to go down and come back up as part of a PR campaign; but it was actually, we had much more load than we thought we would, and we were able to work around our problems. And I think we now have enough capacity to deal with the amount of customers we actually had come into our sites, and we're just growing.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What were some of the best decisions your development team made? What would you give as a recommendation to other entrepreneurs who are just starting out, maybe a year behind you doing it?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
In terms of best technical decisions?
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah, yeah.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I don't know. Any of you guys want to try taking that one?
Randy Puttick - Zillow
Well, certainly the availability of freeware, so things like Tapestry and frameworks to build and shorten the cost and lifecycle a bit.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Leveraging the community.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
I think the inexpensive databases from the outset.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What kind did you use?
Randy Puttick - Zillow
We actually run SQL Server and now MySQL, so we're a combination of making things cheap. All those were good decisions. Our initial glitches were mostly network. So there are some bad, ugly things still there that we're fixing; but in general, I think the time to market, we really did very well. And stability has been -- Fred and I both come from Amazon, where stability is not a keyword, not in freeware, anyway; so I think stability has been shockingly good.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
No, it's fine; like as a customer of Amazon, I never see it go down. Are you talking about different parts of the data center going down?
Randy Puttick - Zillow
Right, right.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What does that mean for -- does that affect the customer experience, or does it just mean something else?
Randy Puttick - Zillow
Yeah, I mean, I used to work -- I was in the search team for years, right? So branding out some of the search boxes was not that uncommon, and it did have site visibility; so mostly brief times, but lots of operational calls, lots of what do we now, how do we grow out more capacity, more scaling emergencies for sure.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I see.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah, I think one of the great things is that we're here to solve business problems; we're not here to write massive frameworks for application development. That's not what our charter is. And a company like Amazon -- I guess Randy was somewhat alluding to this -- they sort of took it upon themselves to build their own frameworks; and rather than spend our times doing that, we said, "Hey, there's all this great open-source software out there" -- Tapestry, Java, tons of other frameworks that we use -- and we leverage all those in building our website. And like Randy said, our time to market has been considerably less.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Several developers at other companies have mentioned that this is a different age in terms of development, in terms of that, that people are sharing more cross-company. And they don't even look at it that way; there's just putting out, oh, here's a widget that does something like a cool CSS hack or Web 2.0 stuff, and you can download that and play with it and learn from it and then adopt it for your own use.
DG Christensen - Zillow
Yeah, that's almost one of the differences between now and '94 is, there's a lot more standard stuff, a lot more collaboration. There's a lot more tools for doing ... for solving problems that came up in the '90s and have been solved a particular way; you know, like Tapestry is an attempt to solve certain problems.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Where do you guys go to find these other developers to share with and other approaches? How do you learn about some other things that you've used?
DG Christensen - Zillow
I just kind of search around on the web and just try to find examples. Being here at Zillow for a shorter time, mostly I'm looking at what has Zillow done to solve certain problems and try to extend that. We all come from -- or most of us come from other companies that have tried to solve these problems -- I'm from Expedia, so I've got some knowledge from what Expedia has tried to do -- and try to insert that into the problems that we come up with at Zillow.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
You guys hang out on Slashdot? What are your favorite sites if you have five minutes free, while the box is compiling or something, to go and surf the web, where would you go?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Our builds don't take that long.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
I'm used to the Microsoft world, building Windows takes a few hours?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
It's Java, it's fast.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
I don't know, I'd say TechCrunch, just because it's kind of become net blogging record for all things in our world, Web 2.0 stuff; Digg occasionally, which is cool.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What part of Digg do you hang out? I hang out on the upcoming part of Digg, where all the new stuff is coming.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Yeah, it's cool to watch kind of their tools; like their Swarming tool and all that stuff, it's really neat. They're really taking advantage of the data and manipulating it in really interesting ways, which is cool, because they're a very small company and they're able to do those things and be very flexible about the way that they're going to present their data, which is something I think that we try to do here as much as we can. It's interesting. We're getting -- we've gotten very big very quickly; when Fred and I started here, we were 35 people, and now we're 130, and it's been a little over a year. So learning how to keep that level of innovation of a company that's growing so quickly, it's an interesting challenge; but it's one that we're definitely working on, we constantly, constantly address.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
How are you guys -- what are some of the techniques you're using to keep innovation going and keep shipping happening instead of bogging down as a committee that's trying to learn how to work together and stuff like that? You're shaking your head.
Randy Puttick- Zillow
Well, actually, we've just reworked, because we've been struggling with different business models. And we ... you know, Fred has come from Expedia. The company was set up like Microsoft/Expedia-ish, if you like, and now we're moving more towards independent teams and more pipelines so we're integrated with PMs and such as that; and Java developers, etcetera, are sitting in one team now, and the idea is to get more pipelines going. That's key, obviously.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
The stacks of ownership are vertical, and so a group of people own feature and they can just take the ball and run, they don't have to go and integrate with other teams and collaborate with them, because there's a huge expense in doing that.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Absolutely, that's really what slowed down Windows Vista was that, taking on of dependencies on the other teams and the other teams weren't ready and so...
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
It just pushes everything out slowly.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That's sort of the nice thing about the new web development world, you can chuck it out and ship a lot faster than in the Windows world, where you have to wait for the whole pie to get cut before you can push it out to the customers. How many times a week do you guys update the site?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Once per week.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
At least once per week.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
After a launch, sometimes several.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
See in the Microsoft world that just doesn't happen, you can't ship and update to the sound recorder in Windows, you got to wait. We have a friend who runs the audio team and he says, you have to wait for five years before you can ship all your fun features you've been working on every week.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah, they have gotten better with the Windows Update, Mac has the Mac Update. And so every day or whenever you turn your computer on, I guess, or wake it, it will go and check to see if there are software updates; but it's not the same thing. It's not a rich feature set that's updating, that's true.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
There's no cost on your customers to download something else and install it and make sure it works.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Yeah, there's no updating of registered files or anything. I think what's cool is the IE 7, the IE 7 just came out, but the new IE 7 team that was kind of reconstituted from the old IE 6 team has done something that was very new for Microsoft, which is to communicate often about what they're doing and they're releasing a product that they're supporting, talking about updating, so it's going to be a really interesting browser to watch, as opposed to IE 6 which we were kind of shackled with.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Now, as the front end guy, do you wish everybody was either on Firefox or IE 7?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
For us, it would be great if everybody used Firefox; but honestly, like Firefox or IE 7 at this point would make our lives a lot easier. There are a lot of things we do to support IE 6 and then before that to support IE 5 and then to support back down the line; but IE 7 I think is their first real, honest crack at entering the modern browser market.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
You test on Safari, as well, probably?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Well, we currently don't have public support for Safari; but we're working on that. We will have it.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
The Mac market share is going up, Guys.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
They have a big school rep coming out this year or early next year?
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
They are. There should be a version of Safari that should ship with Leopard View we will be compatible with; and the great thing is, Safari has -- there's something called Web Kit, which is kind of more of an experimental development build of Safari that we can use and we can test against, so that when it does come out we're ready. We will be ready once Safari is ready to support us for sure.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
When I worked at Visual Basic Programmers Journal, I noticed the development methodology changed quite a bit from like VB3 to VB6. The programming metaphor was much more object-oriented, and everybody had to retrain their mind on how to build things for this new system. What kind of paradigm shift is going on right now? How do you think developers are having to change how they approach building software, especially for the web, versus five years ago? What do you think is ... are you approaching the world a lot differently than you did back then? Certainly you have systems that live on dozens or hundreds of machines and, if you work at Google, thousands or tens of thousands of machines.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Well, I think Java is one of the biggest changes in the last five years. I don't think five years ago people were using Java; it wasn't even around then.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Oh, it was; but...
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
But, not in the state that it is today. I mean, today, it's enterprise-level platform that you can actually build applications on, where back then people were still questioning its place in an enterprise application. Even today, you can't use it to fit every application. I mean, we used it to build a certain type of system that we realized it shouldn't have been used for; and obviously the cache, to keep a full cache of data, and the garbage collector would walk this huge collection every time it wanted to sweep and clean, and seconds of CPU were taken every minute to walk this collection. It was just --
Randy Puttick - Zillow
Which of course is tunable. I mean, there are a lot of Arcana for using Java at an enterprise scale. I think that's changed. I think the Freeware, to me the Freeware adoption -- and the jury is still out on that, because it's really easy to adopt it, to leverage, to come to market early; and then you're like, what do you do when you get a version drop and all those classic problems that don't go away. I think that's certainly a new paradigm. I mean, it's pretty mysterious what's in that box, and most enterprises are pretty conservative about doing versions. Amazon used to sit on Oracle versions for three versions deep or something like that before switching. So, balancing that is I think a new trick that wasn't there in the past.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting. So we covered the paradigm shift for you guys. Now, you guys are forcing a paradigm shift on developers outside with your new opening API -- and it's not just you, it's the mash-up culture, where I can take a thing from Flickr, a thing from you guys, a thing from Amazon and mash them together and build a new kind of service. Tell me a little bit about how you guys are approaching from a development --
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I'll let DG answer that, because he's been working on the API.
DG Christensen - Zillow
Approaching, I'm not -- approaching it more from a --
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What are you seeing from the outside developer view? What kinds of demands are being asked of you, or what are you noticing in the development? When you talk to other geeks, like how are they approaching developing these new kinds of websites that merge together?
DG Christensen - Zillow
Well, actually, Drew is the one who is our... the one who's talking with the developers. We have a form set up for people to talk to us and let us know what they're doing, if they find bugs. A couple of people have posted some applications that they've written using the API, one of them being somebody put together something that I think -- try to calculate your net worth, and your home is of course part of your net worth; so it's taking all these things together, putting up "And your net worth is this", and you can break it down.
Drew Meyers - Zillow
I just brought this up. I don't know if you want to look at it or not, but it's a tool that...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, did you build this, Drew?
Drew Meyers - Zillow
No. This was actually one of the small developers that has worked with our API, and basically what it allows you to do is add your property based on Zillow API, and then I think it actually uses your ... can we type in an address? I'll add -- this is my parents' house that I'll add.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
We'll stay off that, and so your parents don't get weird drive-by traffic.
Drew Meyers - Zillow
So there, it pulls up the Zindex chart, the investments' chart, and then you save the property; and then if you return to the main menu, you can actually add like stocks to this, too. So it basically tries to evaluate your total net worth, not just your property net worth.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, what are they doing? How did the developers build this? What's the API like? Is it a Rest API? How do I --
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
It's a Restful API, yeah. I mean, the API adheres to the standards for web APIs. There's an access team that defines the schema for the data that's coming back, and they work in a Restful manner just for ease of use. We looked at using some Maxima and decided, forget it, it's too heavyweight. And one of the first partners we integrated with was Yahoo!, and their API -- their web services come in two flavors, both Soap and Rest, and they were very much leaning towards the Restful style, because it's so much more intuitive, so much easier. So we said, hey, we'll just use that framework, that platform, because it's so easy to do, especially within Tapestry, because it's essentially just another page; it's just a page of XML rather than HTML.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Now what is Tapestry? You guys have mentioned that a couple of times.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Tapestry is a framework for doing web development. That's the simplest way of putting it. It allows you to ... it's a componentized framework, so it's not a model view controller paradigm; it's a componentized one, where you have a container page and you can instantiate a bunch of different components and throw those in and that container will hold those, and that might be things like a bunch of links or a form or a map, anything you want.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Very cool. What's the coolest things you've seen, done so far with your API? Your API is coming out. It's not even shipping yet, right, if I remember right?
Randy Puttick - Zillow
We've sort of sneaked the whole thing in just with hot fixes and just ... we put it out there, and first the business guys just lined up some partners, and some of them were big; and now the interactive just signed up to use it. It is coming out pretty much as we speak, right, probably tomorrow.
Sarah Mann - Zillow
Thursday, yeah.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Thursday. Wow, it's still going to go up in a couple of weeks or three weeks.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
So, that will allow anyone, essentially, to come to our site and say, hey, I'm going to sign on and access all our data. You can see what we've got on our website. Just like Google Map let's you take a map and stick it on your own website, you can take our data and put it on your website.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah, and that's what I was getting at is, now as a developer in the outside world, I have all these services that I can build a new kind of website. Like I can do a net-worth site, right?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
That's sort of interesting. It's an interesting trend to watch.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
I think there will be a lot of sites that are interested in employing comps and things like that, so making that easy. And again, what tends to happen is, there's an awful lot of large adopters, as well; so it's actually interesting and challenging from predicting traffic. The small ones are more fun; but the big ones drive a lot of traffic, and they want to do ... when they suck down your data, they really want to pull out the data frequently.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah. Are you guys hiring?
Speakers
Yes.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What do you look for in a good developer? I mean, if you're hiring a kid coming out of college, what would catch your eye about somebody?
DG Christensen - Zillow
Somebody who's passionate.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah, I think passion is very important. You have to have a bias for action, passion, drive. You have to be able to take that ball and run.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
So, you look for somebody who's shipped a lot of stuff, even in college, that has a portfolio of interesting stuff like --
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Well, if you're looking at, like, new guys or college kids, then in that sense probably, yeah, somebody who has a lot of experience with the web, is able to carry a conversation and say, this is what's important and why and be able to justify that. But at the same time, if you're looking at a more senior developer, you want someone who can build these systems that we need and understand the problems faced at our end. I mean, things look really rosy and shiny when you see our web page; but there is a lot of stuff behind that. Like you're saying, Google has tens of thousands of machines; but it's one page with one form. What's going on back there? There's tons of stuff going on, and someone who understands those problems and the challenges included there.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
What's your interview process like? Do you run them through a day-long gauntlet like Microsoft does or Amazon does?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I don't think it's that intense. It's not like Microsoft. I think it's a lot more casual. I think it's about four or five interviews, depending on the candidate and the role.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
And that are you looking for in those interviews? What kinds of things do you try to judge?
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Varying things, depending on the role, again. And I guess each person who does the interview looks for a different thing, a different area of expertise to try and see how rounded the person is, how well they will fit into the role.
DG Christensen - Zillow
How good they are at problem solving; what they... we need people who can find out -- search out things on their own. If we've a problem, we need to be able to say, hey, solve this problem, and they can either research it or dig through the code and find out and solve the problems on their own.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Also, I mean, at the very basic understanding, it's kind of -- to bring back to what Fred mentioned, it's a business mindset. They have to have -- they kind of have to understand the business goals. I think a good developer can -- I mean, the fact that they can write good code, I think that's a given. But I think the thing that makes a really great developer is somebody who can understand how they can use that skill to actually meet the business goals in a way that might not have been thought of before.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Interesting. Where do you guys see the market being in, let's say, five years? How is development going to change? How is your development team or your development approach going to change, particularly as the web keeps doubling in size and brings on new markets? China is getting hot, India is getting hot. You're seeing a lot of -- when I grew up on the web, it was mostly an American audience; now it's a worldwide audience, and that became very clear watching Google searches in the lobby, where you saw a lot of non-English searches going by on the lobby screens there, any thoughts on that? It's hard to tell five years, maybe two years from now, how it...
D.G. Christensen - Zillow
Yeah, I think one of the problems that we're going to have to deal with is, we're getting a bigger site, we have more people, we've got be careful that we don't have this like monolithic code base, where it's very difficult to make changes where -- if it's so large, where one change here can affect something over here, and it's kind of what you were saying earlier about...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Dependencies.
D.G. Christensen - Zillow
Yeah, and just dealing with that and trying to create everything so it can scale up.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Handle the traffic.
Randy Puttick - Zillow
So, I would say that -- I mean, I could talk for half an hour on this. I mean, the most obvious things are the web as to the media and that it's self-chosen media, and it's community-oriented media. And so just sort of bringing disparate groups together or geographically distributed people together, that's been the web from the beginning; but the maturation of that process is I think what we'll see in the next five to ten years. We're a media company for a business model. The fact that that model can come into being so easily today is in evidence of that maturation, and the fact that the business people can still stare at the advertising numbers and say, people are on the web this many hours, and they're on TV this many hours, and TV sucks, right. But advertising dollars are this much on the TV side and this much on the web side, I mean, those are -- that will balance, obviously; I mean, hence the interest in Google. I think that's -- what happens to transactions, I remember hoping that all the middlemen would drop out many years ago, and factories would all come online, and everybody would be buying their products directly and etcetera, etcetera. And to a degree that happened, but then there's also a shift of where the middlemen go and how that runs in the more modern world.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Yeah. Well, thanks, guys, for spending some time. Where do I learn about the API? I notice you have a website up there.
Drew Meyers - Zillow
Well, this is not yet live, but it will be live by the time this video goes live, I guess.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Alright.
Drew Meyers - Zillow
So, this is kind of the new API Network that allows anyone to -- assuming they adhere to the terms of use and the brand-use requirements, it allows anyone to put Zillow data on their own site. So, there are kind of some terms they use, developer guides. And the new thing with this open API as far as the data available is the property details. So now, people are going to be able to pull beds, baths, square footage, last sale price, last sale date; and those have been some of the features that ... I've been talking to a lot of these small API developers, so those are the things people have asked for, and that's kind of where we've gone.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Cool.
Drew Meyers - Zillow
So, do you want to walk through any of the...
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Well, I'm almost out of tape. I've got like 60 seconds of tape left. So I'll think I'll just -- do you want to ask a question?
Buzz Bruggeman
I have one question; it's being pushed back about privacy.
Speaker
(Inaudible).
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Third media train. That's like a potty-trained developer there.
Buzz Bruggeman
Because I'm older than you guys, you know, obviously; but I've noticed that the privacy push-back is generational; that people my age are very concerned about privacy, and as you get younger, the privacy just sort of ...
D.G. Christensen - Zillow
Obviously, the privacy issues change. Younger people today are very interested in privacy, but it's kind of different areas of privacy. And I can't really come up with an example off the top of my head, but there are ... older generation are worried about certain things that they want to keep private, and the younger generation, "Don't worry about that, but this is what I worry about."
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
I mean, we're in a generation where people will go on MySpace and spill out their whole lives and say, these are all my friends, these are all my hobbies, this is everything I do. Who cares who knows where my house is and how much it's worth?
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
My tape's running out, sorry.
D.G. Christensen - Zillow
Okay.
Robert Scoble - The ScobleShow
Let me get another tape if we're going to keep going. But thank you very much. This has brought me a lot of fun.
Fred Sadaghiani - Zillow
Yeah, thank you.
D.G. Christensen - Zillow
Thanks.
Bill Nordwall - Zillow
Thanks.