Part of the reason that it took me so long is because I was really compelled to give it a fair trial. The idea to be able to better manage your expenses, is a very interesting one that has a rather large potential market. Just about everyone I know has a bank account, and most of them are pretty unimpressed by the online services offered as well as by the idea of using Quicken or Excel.

Wesabe a very innovative solution for getting your financial data into a nice clean format that is ripe for analysis. On a higher level, they are using the wisdom of crowds to try teach us personal finance best practices. This isn’t a topic that most people are willing to share and talk about openly, so the social benefits of this application down the road are enormous. I absolutely encourage you to take a look at this service, and most of my analysis below is positive. My only criticisms are because they have done is such a great job so far, that it begs to be taken to the next level.

Wesabe gets a critical piece of the puzzle dead-on, right from the start. They figured out a way, using their uploader, to make it easy for someone to pull all of their financial information from a variety of different accounts into one useful piece of software. My previous solution for personal finance management was the Microsoft “personal budget” excel template, and it required a rather painful process to get the data from my bank account into the appropriate format for using a spreadsheet. That problem is now solved.

The next thing Wesabe does incredibly well, is that it allows you to tag all of your expenses quickly. Wesabe learns from the process, so as soon as it has a vendor/expense in the system it recognizes it and automatically uses your previous tags. Yet again I was ecstatic, it’s not often that I use a web2.0 application that has this much utility. Most fall short at the very first step.

Unfortunately, this is where I felt that Wesabe starts to taper off. Because the tagging was so easy, I had all of my expenses tagged like crazy in no time. I was able to click on each of the tags, and get some decent graphs, and see how often I was incurring expenses under that tag. The problem was, that my tags were all over the place. Despite the fact that tags have been applied to just about everything in the Web 2.0 world, there are some data structures where tags inherently don’t apply. Personal budgeting is one of these.

If we go back to my trusty Microsoft “personal budget” template, we see that we have a nice structure organizing all of my different categories of expenses. This guarantees that all my reporting is logical, that i’m placing expenses consistently in the right category, and it results in me seeing which areas I need to work on. The natural activity of tagging itself doesn’t result in such a structured group of categories, so i found that I wasn’t able to get as useful an analysis from my data in Wesabe.

Now, Wesabe got a lot of things right. The UI is great, auto uploading of data is really practical, and the automatic tagging is extremely time-saving. But too much of Wesabe is up to the end user and how they use tags. It’s a shame for Wesabe to have built such a great system (with plenty more to come!) up until this point, only to fall short with this tagging mass at the end user can create.

They have the potential here to do amazing things with the user’s data, and if they help the end-user get to a useful analysis of their expenses quicker, Wesabe will have an incredibly sticky application.

I left out any mention of social benefits until the end intentionally. Because I started using the software so early, I’m not sure that I have actually felt these “wisdom of crowds” benefits yet. Additionally, I feel many of the financial tips that the site offers so far are quite rudimentary. I recognize that these benefits will kick in after a certain critical mass has been reached, and I see a really sticky application as the first step to getting there. The application has to be useful to people immediately on its own before it can start relying on the social benefits as a selling point.

More to come on this topic, some competition is on the way and I can’t wait to take a good look!

Luckily, Rod, from 5280Angel in Denver, posted about his Kiva loans being repayed, and his active portfolio page was really what drew me in. I took a quick look at the rest of the site, which is brilliantly done by the way, and then signed to help finance a few loans.

The next day I received this in the mail:

Dear XXXX,

This is an update on Tamales “Doña Amalia” written by Victor Paredes:

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Amalia Rodríguez Martínez by Admic Nacional in Mexico. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 6 – 12 months, Admic Nacional will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

Kiva very much appreciates your responses online. You can read and respond to this journal online at:
http://www.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&action=comment&id=10833&ent=12312

Some of our partners choose to write their journal entries in the local language in order to keep their overhead low. If this journal entry is in a foreign language, please feel free to use an online translator such as Altavista’s Babelfish (http://babelfish.altavista.com).

Thanks!

– Kiva Staff

The rest of the money needed to match the loan must have been raised shortly after I contributed, so off it goes to the entrepreneur.

More to come on Kiva. I love the site, love the design, and really like the simple model (check out a great interview with the CEO here). Glad to see people out there are effectively applying the powers of web2.0 (and technology in general) to potentially help the world.

Today, the Google Reader blog just announced that they have added an offline mode to their application. Really looking forward to traveling in order to put this feature to use.

A few more features and they will clearly be ahead of the pack (aka authenticated RSS feeds, and a better way to organize/manage your feeds).

Things I like about Diigo:

• Being able to clip content from an article and save it with the bookmark.
• Having an archived copy of the article when I bookmark it.
• Being able to share the bookmark to a “group” within Diigo.
• Being able to have my bookmarks set to private by default, so that I don’t share company research with the world.
• Automatically seeing highlights of clipped text on articles I’ve already bookmarked.
• The Firefox plug-in “auto-fills” tags as you try to type, which helps you stick to a specific groups of tags, so they end up more organized.

Things I don’t like about Diigo:

• I really would like to be able to archive password protected content. If I can copy and paste it from the browser, then I should be able to archive it to my bookmarking application for future reference.
• More powerful group features, like being able to manage and view the tags, as well as being able to get a private RSS feed of all the bookmarks that are being added to that group.
• Discussions, the concept is interesting in theory but I still have not figured out how to use them. Maybe they will be useful from the group level.
• There was no clear feedback mechanism for Diigo, since then they have launched a Diigo forum, which is a step in the right direction.
• The Firefox plug-in added a right-click context menu drop down that really drove me crazy, though I was eventually able to turn it off.
• No way to manage multiple Diigo accounts. You have to go to the Diigo page, logout, then log back in to be able to use a different account from your Diigo Firefox plug-in.

Generally speaking, I think Diigo is one of the most powerful social bookmarking tools out there, though I don’t think I’m using it for any social purpose’s. Most of my personal bookmarks I just have Diigo automatically post a copy to my del.icio.us account as well. The group features are useful, the archiving features are great, but there’s a lot more to be done before a tool like this can be the single tool to help someone process all of the data they go through on the Web at a given day.

Giving “small company” like accessibility to larger organizations. This could even lead to some sort of digital reputation building within organizations.

All of the bookmarklets where too slow to tag on the fly, so i moved to using Pukka. This took care of the speed issues, and I was able to tag more material faster, and to multiple different accounts.

The big problems began when it came time for retrieving information from my database. When I’m looking for “that article that one guy wrote about that one thing that one time?” Then I can barely remember a tag or two, so what I really need is a fast way to scan through all of the bookmarks containing certain tags. I tried cocoalicious and delicious director, which where closer to what I wanted, but still not quite fast or flexible enough.

Then after another one of my rant’s about how delicious addressed the user’s selfish needs for better bookmarking first, before trying to sell the user’s on the social aspects, I decided I wanted to track down the blog post where I had originally read the idea. After a couple minutes of frustrating search through my delicious account, I decided to call for help. I went to the research machine. The guru of efficiently consuming and archiving data across the web. Rob Finn, of Ventureblogalist.

So, using gmail, I sent him an e-mail that went a little something like this:

Me:

Rob,

Quick question about an article we talked about during tech crunch. I was talking about delicious, and how you needed to have a service that speaks to a users selfish needs first before you sell them on the social aspects. AKA, the hook, the service needs to be useful on its own because people don’t go to delicious to share, they go to have a better way to manage their bookmarks, the social benefits were just an side effect.

Anyway, I’m trying to track downt he article that first said all of that. Any idea where it was?

Then His reply a few seconds later:

http://bokardo.com/archives/learning-more-about-structured-blogging/

How did he find it so fast!! He certainly didn’t use delicious. Well, I’ll attempt to get to the point. It turns out he had set up Google Co-op’s Custom Search Engine to search through all of the blogs he reads. As with me, most of the articles/links that get tagged into delicious probably came from these feeds, so its a safe bet that the Google Co-op search will turn up what you were looking for.

Sure enough. Search for two words “delicious” and “selfish”, and you get the Bokardo article as the first result! Hmmm, maybe that’s why Google is a verb. I love finding what I need with a few keystrokes.

Thanks for the great tip Rob. Google Co-op based on my feeds can be found below. I’m sure none of this is totally new or original, but I just didn’t have the time, energy, or brains to put this together sooner.

I never spent much time thinking about the apartment markets while I was in Houston, but my recent experience in New York City were so horrifying that I really felt something needed to be done.

Existing solutions seem to come from the mindset that they need to fight the system from within. They aim to undercut broker prices by being more efficient (see applying any technology what so-ever), or they just try targeting a larger market. One of the most recent examples can be found here… XXX has had a series of posts about Redfin, a relatively new low cost residential web-based real estate broker. Though it addresses the home buying market, I hope to see some of their practices carry over to the rental market.

After working with a couple brokers to find rentals in New York City I reallized that they are not evil people. They are working in a market with massive inequalities of information, and fairly low incentives to maintain high customer satisfaction. Especially in NYc with such high demand for housing, the renter is at a disadvantage. People will do anything to find a new place, and many of them coming into the city for the first time know absolutlely nothing about how the system works…. In the end this leads to over-priced apartments, rushed decisions, brokers gaming the system to close more deals, and very unhappy renters.

What I propose is a tool or portal to empower the buyers again. Something that can give them information they need to make smarter decisions and have a bit more power in their court for the negotiating. At the same time I see the same simple tool being applied to the brokers "to keep them honest".

The tools have been built before and the model is being tested by other companies, so its just a matter of piecing it together.

Phase 1: Empowering Buyers

While searching for my apartment in the city I noticed one thing really made my broker nervous. This cardinal sin was talking to other brokers and the other brokers clients (yes, I'm a chatty guy). The more I talked, the more I learned. Combined with some creative filtering of RSS feeds, and some shifty online research I was able to get a much better feel for the market.

In particular I searched craigslist and called a LOT of brokers. I developed a good system of questions to ask each broker, and lost any sense of common decency while on the phone, so i went right for the jugular. The point being, is that each person searching for an apartment is seeing the market from a different perspective and learns different things from that market. Should craigslist simply have had a way to post comments, things would have been much easier.

Enter my previous idea to use social bookmarking sites with comments as a way to "impose" comments on sites that don't have them. An added benefit is that these comments can reach across multipled information sources. You're not restricted to just craigslist or edgio. Any site that generates a static URL for the life of the post can be commented on through a service such as Diggo. If you have a site that was focused on real estate in a certain city, the bookmarks users create, could serve as a way to provide feedback on those posts. End-users searching for apartments could combine their knowledge to help offset the advantage brokers have.

Examples of social bookmarking sites that could be used:

• http://www.diggo.com
• www.shadows.com
• http://www.markaboo.com

None of them are setup to address this problem, and I would argue that the comments section on these services are very poorly designed. The point is, that with a little bit of code, you could come up with something very similar that would work.

With enough people loading tips and tricks, while posting "the reality" behind many of these online postsings, empowered users will be able to gain a better negotiating position.

Phase 2: Punishing the violators

The other side of this problem is that with the continual influx of renters in NYC coming from all across the world brokers have a fresh supply of new suckers. To be able to provide some continuity between the renter, we need to have a place for them to leave feedback or rate their experiences with different brokers. The biggest issues I see are making sure people are who they say they are, so they can be held accountable for their feedback. This is an area where I have very little experience, but I've found a couple of other sites that are working to solve this problem.

Websites that have buyer/seller rating systems:

• http://www.rapleaf.com/ – a real-estate site may be able to leverage rapleaf rather than re-inventing the wheel
• http://panjiva.com/
• http://www.homethinking.com/

To summarize my very "on the back of a napkin" idea, I see a sight that serves as a portal for the new york city apartment rental market. It is a one of a kind market, so it deserves its own community site. A social bookmarking feature with bookmark comments would provide a way for users to exchange information about apartment listings across all services. At the same time some sort of buyer/seller reputation ranking service would help renters get a better feel for which brokers to work with. Combine with some mildly decent content you could really provide some value in this space. As far as i can tell there aren't many people even providing tips or tricks much less full on tools to help these renters out (i'll eventually be posting some articles about this at www.scoutsider.com).

From the Hall: GmailThis!

GmailThis! <– just drag this to your browser’s bookmark toolbar.

The Gmail This bookmarklet rocks, and Its worked its way into my daily routine much faster than any new application. For some reason I want to compare this to the social bookmarking apps, and I definitely picked this up faster than those, and its doing a better job of getting my links and articles to the people I think should read them.

Feature Request: I’d love to see this integrated with delicious or onlywire! Combining gmail and delicious could allow you to track interesting conversations about articles. Diigo takes a stab at this, but the actual commenting doesn’t work in closed groups. It all goes back to the BLAG concept, that I continue to seek out a solution for.