I was trying to rent my 2 br (technically 1 br since 2nd br was large but didn't have closet) place in hayes valley and saw this happen nearly in the blink of an eye: I had a renter ready to go at $3,000/ mo in December, but foolishly turned him down because he needed it too quickly and I wasn't yet ready to move out. Then in January, a lot of people coming through kept mentioning how many 2 br's were out there, and I ultimately ended up renting it for $2650 after the applicant showed me several comps at lower prices.
One of the sites he mentioned in there, covestor, seems pretty interesting in how it links to an investor's actual trading account to track his record. To me, that makes a lot more sense than following a financial adviser's advice to buy something they don't even own.
Here is the post from the perspective of the VC that invested in Covestor. It highlights the opportunities in disrupting the asset management industry.
Funny a friend just introduced this game to me a couple weeks ago, it is pretty fun and easy to learn buy in my opinion too short, more like a rush to get 10 points than a thorough strategy game. For the first few games, just when I had my little economy humming along somebody would bust out their ten victory points out of nowhere.
All these missteps by Facebook sounds eerily like the MLS in the real estate industry: a closed database that started as private property (belonging to Realtors) and slowly being pried open by lawsuits and by companies who do a much better job presenting the data (Zillow, Trulia, etc). Maybe Facebook isn't a "platform", it's just a database, and eventually people will stop using the site all together and access the database from a completely different site that's customized to suit their needs/ tastes. People argued that everyone had a right to listing info with houses (even though the MLS has some confidential info, that was resolved), so why not with our personal data (with privacy safeguards, of course)?
