trulia

Trulia: Bucking the layoff trend

Real-estate sites had some tough times last week. First, Redfin, an online brokerage for residential real estate, announced that it was laying off 20 percent of its staff, then Zillow, a service that delivers home values and lists sales, announced that it was forced to lay off 25 percent of its workforce.

But Trulia, which lets buyers find homes for sale across the United States, says it has no layoff plans and that it has enjoyed so much growth, it's actually looking to expand.

"We are not making any layoffs. All companies need to be smart in this … Read more

Trulia, Stamen team up for more eye candy for house hunters

Real estate search and resource service Trulia has a new tool built by the guys at Stamen Design called Snapshot. It's built off of Microsoft Virtual Earth and shows off little clusters of homes all over a 2D map. It's been pitched as an "alternate" view of the Trulia real estate listings, but a better way to describe it is pure, unadulterated eye candy.

That's not to say it's without use though. You can sort out houses in your area by price tag, or simply when they were listed. Each house has a little … Read more

Twitter does visualizations: useful bird-themed eye candy

Twitter's just launched a new portion of their service called Explore. It's essentially a "labs" section, and home to a handful of old (and new) tools to integrate and browse Twitter. The newest addition, called "Blocks," is a 3-D visualization of your friends and followers, and what amounts to a 3-D social graph of Twitter buddies. The tool loads up with a neat popping effect that looks like little rooftops, and similar to the neat startup video on the Apple TV. Each one is actually a message. Mousing over it will show you who … Read more

Trulia gets real estate visualization

Trulia is a real estate search and information service. Users can search for real estate by zip code, or by filling in various search parameters like size, cost, and building type. Trulia also integrates several social features like a way to track buying trends, and a real-estate focused question and answer service.

Today, they've teamed up with Stamen Design, the same folks who do the eye candy for Digg Labs, to create a really neat way to look at housing trends called HindSight. Their new tool is a mix between historical real estate data, and a heat map to … Read more