You don't have to look long to find a story about technological disruption; I think the term is overused and the true definition is misinterpreted in many cases.
Criagslist is a pretty cool service - most people agree it's disruptive - it qualifies as a disruptive technology for these reasons.
- Companies Depend on Customers and Investors for Resources
- Small Markets Don't Solve the Growth Needs of Large Companies
- Markets That Don't Exist Can't Be Analyzed
- Technology Supply May Not Equal Market Demand
What if something quickly emerged that would disrupt Craigslist? A system that combined and harnessed all the power of eBay, PayPal, Google Maps, Criagslist, MLS, and Google Local Search into a single service that any real estate agent could leverage to sell properties?
There's a new kind of technology fabric being stitched together with simple XML documents and Web Services. The cornerstone and most important element of this new fabric is finally in place - a programming interface (API) for Google Base. The API provides the ability for XML-enabled applications to communicate directly through the Google Base API to automate the publishing and indexing of content related to things people want to buy and products and services that people want to sell.
Think mondo-meta-C2B2C (consumer to business to consumer) communications platform; Google has a grand scheme that will simplify the marketing, discovery, distributiuon, and payment for just about anything you could imagine. I'm not suggesting that Google will actually perform all the processes described in the previous sentence - but Google will make it easier to be part of the business fabric and paricipate in these processes with great efficiency and profitability.
What can you do to prepare for disruption of the disruptors? Make sure everything you build on the Web from this point forward is...
- XHTML compliant
- XML-based
- Leverages open standards
How the emergence of these new ideas will affect real estate agents and the real estate industry is anybody's guess - I'd rather you commented on that.
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