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February 9, 2006

Zillow 'zestimates' house values; Songbird: open source Web music player; fun rabbit game; geeks meet, eat

Public records mashup: How much is your house worth? Zillow knows, reads the headline at CNet about Expedia founder Richard Barton's Seattle startup, Zillow. Zillow uses public data to come up with "Zestimates," although at the moment it seems to be largely for entertainment purposes.

Putting my address into its maps mashup yielded a "No home data for Providence yet" message. There does seem to be some for Newport, though -- the dozen or so prices I clicked on were all the tax assessor's valuations.

Business Week's Peter Coy had a different experience.

A couple of weeks ago, when Barton and his team came by BusinessWeek's New York HQ for a secret demo, I plugged in my house in New Jersey and was horrified to see it listed for about 40% less than I think it's worth. The explanation: Inadequate data. I'm picturing thousands or millions of people across the country clicking on Zillow and getting that same stab of fear: "This can't be right!"

It took a few tries to get in: The Seattle PI noted, Zillow swamped, crashes: Home-valuation Web site attracts millions of visitors.

Newborn of Winamp and Firefox: Songbird "is a Web (music) player built from Firefox's browser engine. Songbird is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions."

Oh, and by the way, Songbird Debut Strains Servers at Songbirdnest. Here's the download mirror (although the main link seems to be automatically redirecting now). Among the features: Play anything, two included themes, build custom mixes, plays MP3s without leaving the page, play web pages as playlists, integrated Web search, and, soon, CD import and burn. This preview is Windows only, but Mac and Linux versions are coming.

Here's BoingBoing's interview with founder Rob Lord, once an early Winamp employee.
Reviews, etc.:
Songbird is out, and quite cool: Firefox + music + Winamp brains = Good Inquirer, UK.
Songbird: Open-Source iTunes Killer? PC World.
Songbird "User Preview" First Look at eHomeUpgrade.
Songbird, a nifty new Web browser and media player -- and iTunes killer? at SilconBeat

Related: Free & Open Source includes a short list of sites where you can buy full mp3s not crippled by DRM (digital rights management).

Wabbits!: Dodge That Anvil is a terrific, addicting online (Shockwave) game with carrots, rabbits, dynamite, flippers, umbrellas and deadly dropping anvils. Do the tutorial, it's helpful and fun. Read all about it at Jay Is Games.

Good start: I dropped by the first Providence Geek Dinner last night, and got to put faces on some familiar names in R.I. blogging -- O'Reilly author Brian Jepson and Tom Hoffman -- and met some new ones, such as Andrew Gilmartin of South Kingstown, who wrote the first Gopher client for the Mac, and new Rhode Islander (from New York) Jack Templin.

Some came to eat -- a food spill caused a quick lifting of laptops -- and others to clump in small standing groups. In one clump, Jim Willis, IT director for the Secretary of State's office, beamed about how they're making government data available by RSS feed.

Low-key and casual, the meet worked. I hope there'll be many more.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 9:44 AM | Permalink