Last September, when Microsoft first launched its “I’m a PC” ads, we pointed out that Apple was a marketing behemoth, and Microsoft was the nerdy engineering company:

 We think of Apple as a products company, and Microsoft as a business behemoth, but Apple is the company that floods the airwaves with ads while Microsoft is mostly a company of software engineers. Every time I’m about to buy an Airbook, I wonder how much of its cost is its carefully constructed image.

An astute commenter on that post, Mark Zims of Toronto, compared the actual spending on sales & marketing for both Apple and Dell: 12%, for both.

We also noted that the ad would be difficult for Apple to one-up. When Apple finally did take it shot, a month later, it complained about Microsoft’s ad spending, prompting TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld to complain that Apple spends plenty of money on advertising too.

Last night, courtesy of Lindsay Blakeley, TechCrunch reported on the precise amount Apple spends on advertising alone, $438 million (13% of total sales & GA expenses) in FY07 compared to the $300 million Microsoft spent marketing Windows Vista.  The comparison is slightly unfair, because Apple also sells iPhones, iPods and Macs, not just an operating system, but Windows also has far more sales.

No matter how you slice it, our original point still seems worthwhile: Apple is more of a marketing company than Microsoft, by a long shot.

We think Lisa Hurt is the first Redfin seller to promote her home for sale in Bothell with Twitter!

While Lisa is new to Twitter it’s exciting to see sellers using different online mechanisms to promote their listings. I definitely think that Twitter, especially if you have a decent number of followers, can be a great way to generate traffic to your listing.

Don’t have a lot of followers yet? Check out Guy Kawasaki’s guide, How to Pick Up Followers on Twitter.

Or maybe you have a tech savvy friend who already does? Get them to Tweet your listing for you.

If you do have some followers and your Twitter and Facebook are already hooked up here are some ideas on how to use Twitter to promote your listing:

• Let your followers know when your listing hits the market
• Let your followers know when you hold an open house
• Let your followers know if you do a price reduction
• Keep followers up-to-date on how things are going. How many people came to your open house?
• Use a service like bit.ly (@bitly thanks for helping us with bulk URLs!) to make the Redfin URLs shorter and Twitter friendly
• You could switch your profile background to a photo of your house or a screenshot of your home’s details page on Redfin
• Change your Twitter web link to your listing details page
• Link to your listing details page from your Twitter Bio
• Ask your followers for help moving once it sells!
• Let us know at @redfin

Do you any other ideas on using Twitter for real estate?

You can find Redfin on Twitter in a number of spots:Our company account, Rob, Glenn, myself and many more.

If you have a question about selling your home ask in our seller forums and we’ll be happy to look into it!

The New York Times published yesterday an article about how Barack Obama is using social networks not just to raise money but also to communicate directly with citizens. It is a measure of how much many folks on the web believe in Obama as their candidate that he is being now lobbied via the web. Wouldn’t it be exciting if he listened?

But in talking about how politicians use the web to influence citizens, the article neglected to mention how citizens are using the web to influence politics. It has been on my mind lately because of two emails I got in the past 24 hours: one from Matt Lerner, promoting a Digg-style site for voting on the priorities of an Obama CTO. And the other from Ben Elowitz, about a Wetpaint-powered site for mobilizing protest against California’s Proposition 8.

Beyond chattering about gadgets and kitty photos, it seems like Web 2.0 has found a larger purpose. Part of this seems to be a byproduct of the web’s becoming easy enough for anyone to use, and part of it is a function of web-savvy people becoming more politicized.

That’s a big change. As long as I’ve been in technology, “Live free or die” was a UNIX rallying cry, not a political slogan, and the dominant political strain was libertarian. Now Silicon Valley has become a force of elites, like Hollywood, with an active interest in government and outsized ambitions to influence the rest of the world.

Naturally, members of the technology elite view this as a very good thing, the Revenge of the Nerds on a political scale. And I do too. But I also wonder what it means for poor folks and older folks who are less web-savvy — and now maybe less influential.

I also wonder what the next revolution will be like — not the kind talked about in Redfin’s press releases — but one involving protests,  barricades, tear gas and fallen governments, which seems to happen somewhere every few years. It will probably start on Facebook and Twitter.

Following Andreas Kluth’s essay in The Economist, Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? and the recent Atlantic essay “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” said on Friday that the blogosphere is dead:

While there continue to be many blogs, including a lot of very good ones, it seems to me that one would be hard pressed to make the case that there’s still a “blogosphere.” That vast, free-wheeling, and surprisingly intimate forum where individual writers shared their observations, thoughts, and arguments outside the bounds of the traditional media is gone. Almost all of the popular blogs today are commercial ventures with teams of writers, aggressive ad-sales operations, bloated sites, and strategies of self-linking. Some are good, some are boring, but to argue that they’re part of a “blogosphere” that is distinguishable from the “mainstream media” seems more and more like an act of nostalgia, if not self-delusion.

Noting that 94% of blogs have been abandoned, Mr. Carr compares the initial proliferation of amateur bloggers to radio’s earliest days when, as one contemporary account observed, thousands of amateur broadcasters turned the entire country into “a vast whispering gallery.”

It’s an amazing essay, exactly the kind that argues for professional writers to blog. And of course he’s right: when Tina Brown edits Vanity Fair,  The New Yorker and then a blog, you can’t really deny that blogs have become a major commercial enterprise.

But hey, it’s about time. The commercialization of online journalism isn’t a tragedy; it’s the de-commercialization of journalism that has been the tragedy. For years now, the suppliers of information — the writers who actually gather news — have done all the work and the Internet aggregators such as Google and Yahoo have mostly profited from it.

Karl Marx would have called this a contradiction of capitalism, with technology taking the place of capital as the way to create surplus value.  It’s good to see online journalists take charge of the machinery and turn their blogs into businesses. As for the rest of us, Mr. Carr shouldn’t worry: trust me, there will always be a place on the Internet for amateurs.

It’s been a busy few months and an all hands on deck effort as we changed not just our service (Read Glenn’s blog post on the service changes) but updated the website to match. Every page was touched, all the content was re-written, and no pixel was left un-turned (except the blog layouts which will be updated later this week ).

Here’s a walk through of everything that’s new.

New Homepage, Header and Design

Returning visitors go straight to the map so you may not have noticed our new home page.

To help folks navigate the site we released a new header with drop down menus making it easy to find an agent or more information on buying or selling. We’ve also tweaked our design in a number of spots to make it easier to read, more user friendly and ensure that you can quickly engage an agent when you have questions.

Learn About Our Agents

We’ve had agent profiles showing their recent transactions and customer ratings for a while now but with our release today they’re much more accessible and now feature an agent’s posts in our forums and their active listings. Take a look at Gina’s profile to see what we mean. With today’s changes you can now meet agents at agent office hours or our home buying class.

In addition every details page has a “Work With A Redfin Agent” button that takes you to an agent chooser to help you get started:

15% More Inventory

We now have all the MLS listed homes for sale in every market we’re in:

• Multi-family: Duplexes, triplexes and whole apartment buildings. If you want to buy a two to four unit building, Redfin can help.
• Land: If you’re up for the challenge!
• “Other”: Parking spots, moorage, house boats.

Here’s what the icons look like:

We also upgraded the Seattle and Ventura County homes for sale feeds.

More Search Options

You asked, we listened.

• Separate Out Townhouses: Our most frequent feature request in Seattle is to enable people to get rid of townhouses from their searches. Now you can!
• Parking and Garages: In San Francisco and other densely populated places folks really want to find places with parking. In suburban places they want to find garages. Now you can do both.
• Waterfront: When only the best or most expensive will do, this will help you find it.

On our neighborhood pages we also added a “Most Popular” tabs so you can see what’s hot. Here’s what’s popular in Boston.

Features for a Distressed Market

• Price reduced: Quickly find listings that have been recently reduced to jump on a new deal or ones that haven’t had one in a while in the hopes you get to them before they reduce again.
• Short sales: Exclude them from your search since they’re so hard to buy.
• Property history: Now see a home’s complete history.
• CDOM: In Seattle and Boston we now show the cumulative days on market direct from the MLS.

Take Notes

Every listing details or past sale page now has a notes box. You can now keep track of your first impressions and notes from seeing an open house or going on a tour. See all your notes on one page.

Offer and Listing Wizards

We’ve also improved our offer and listing wizards making it easier than ever to get started with Redfin.

We Hope You Like It

Thanks for all your feedback leading up to this release; we ran over two dozen focus groups and usability studies! They were at times painful to watch.

And a big thanks to our rockstar dev team and everyone else and Redfin. We hope the site is better than ever and that this release will be the one that takes Redfin mainstream.

If you have any suggestions or find any bugs let us know in the comments! In the meantime we’ll keep working on the next release of Redfin.

Redfin started life as a cult for what my mom still likes to call “your little web friends.” But our goal has always been to become a religion, appealing to grandmas and truck-drivers and everyone in between too.

Unlimited Tours, Agent Choice
To hit the mass market, we’re upgrading today our home-buying service to offer free unlimited tours, and a choice of agent, and support from that agent all along the way. We’re changing our home-selling service to offer in-home consultation, open houses, a big marketing blitz and tours for any interested buyers.

50% Commission Refund
And we’re raising prices. Tours are now free — we used to charge $250 per tour –  but we’re changing the commission refund for buyers from 66% to 50% (existing customers relax, you pay the old price).  The average refund should drop from $10,000+ to nearly $8,000.  If people use Redfin to sell one house and buy another, the total savings should still in most cases be about $20,000.

They’re big changes, which we first tested in April, researched in June, and discussed as recently as September.  You can get all the details from our press release, or check out the new search features.

We can’t imagine why anyone would choose a traditional agent over Redfin. We now offer just about every personal service offered by a traditional agent with the possible exception that we won’t preview homes on our own.

More Personal Service, More Online Service
But our goal still isn’t to be just like a traditional agent. It’s to be much better. We’re offering more personal service, but we’re also offering more online service too. The whole website changed to let you evaluate an agent, choose an agent, request home tours, ask questions. Hopefully this combines the personal & the online into one seamless offering.

Still Different from Other Brokerages, at a Molecular Level
And hopefully, this means we can change the game not just for a handful of digerati, but for everybody. Because more than ever that’s what we are here to do, to give consumers the information and tools to be a partner in the process, not a sales target. The difference between Redfin and traditional brokers is obvious and simple and huge and it has nothing to do with offering more tours:

• Free the data: we publish data other brokers won’t. This makes our customers smarter and more powerful. Our site traffic has grown more than 300% year-over-year.
• Ditch the sales-force: our customers come to us via the Web. We don’t have a sales-force. This is how we afford a commission refund of 50%.
• Back off: we have always been a customer-service organization — a fanatical customer-service organization — not a sales machine. We pay agents on customer satisfaction, not commissions, so customers won’t feel pressured into a high price range. Our customers get the time & space to make their own decisions, and advice they can trust. Our customer satisfaction rate is 97%; the industry average is 85%.
• Get results not relationships: our agents’ job isn’t to buy you dinner. It’s to get our customers the best deal. We measure our agents’ performance and our agents perform better in negotiations. For two straight years in every market we’ve measured, we’ve negotiate a bigger discount off list price, by about $3,500.

There’s nothing in our DNA about refusing to help people see a home they want to buy, or telling them to hold their questions until they’ve submitted an offer. But even though these limitations are obvious and stupid, we clung to them for a long time.

What Took Us So Long?
I’ve sometimes thought the most conservative organization in the world is a startup, which spends so much energy nurturing its delicate sense of self against naysayers and self-doubt that it can hardly admit mistakes.

We thought that changing a consumer service designed mostly on the back of a napkin in 2006 meant having to admit we were wrong (it does). And I thought for a long time that offering personal service meant we weren’t an online service (it doesn’t).

So in focus group after focus group, customers said they wanted more tours, they wanted to be able to call their agent, that the difference between a 50% or 66% refund didn’t matter much to them. But we continued to make identity-based decisions about what we could and could not do. Many meetings ended by my saying, “that’s not who we are.”

Change is Good
Then, Fred Wilson talked about how startups are a “process of going down lots of dark alleys only to find that they are dead ends… and trying another and another until you find the one paved with gold.”

CEO Tony Hsieh said that Zappos isn’t an e-commerce company or a shoe company but “a customer-service company that happens to sell shoes.”

Redfin Director Marc Singer said that consumer companies have to change constantly, because they’re listening to consumers constantly.

We were never at a dead-end — revenues grew more than 40%, even this year — and we’ve always been customer-service fanatics, but we have resisted thinking these changes through to their logical conclusion.

A Software Company Becomes a Consumer Company
The conclusion I’ve come to is this: that more than just upgrading our service, Redfin grew up today. We’re still using technology to change the game, but technology is just a means to an end, not an end in itself. This means we’re not a technology company, or a real estate company, but a consumer company.

We know this is a good change for our customers. We believe it’s a good change for us too. We’ve got another big change coming in the spring. But for now, let’s see what you think of what we’ve done so far.

Thanks to all our supporters, and all the folks at Redfin past and present who helped to launch the new service.

(And tune in later today for a visual walk-through of all the new website features.)

Some thought the day would never come but once we spotted the cars it was only a matter of time.

Yesterday Google Street View launched in DC, Baltimore and Seattle. Those areas are now available on Redfin giving us Google Street View coverage for every market we are in.

Take a look at one of our Seattle listings, 1803 Bigelow Ave North:

It also looks like Street View may have been worth the wait as this imagery appears to be higher quality than other cities and features four zoom levels. Perfect for checking out what your new neighborhood looks like.

Here’s the Seattle coverage area:

Earlier this month, Janelle sent out an email to the entire Seattle office soliciting people to build on last year’s hit costume of Donald DeSantis dressed as Rob McGarty by getting as many people as possible to dress as Scott Nagel, VP of Real Estate and affectionately known as “The Silver Fox.” She hatched the plan with a short email “We found a great deal on Silver Fox wigs. We are ordering as many as it takes, but you need to give mykie the full amount of $11.25 by end of day Wednesday to make it happen.” Followed by this picture.

We counted 23 Silver Fox impersonators at our annual Halloween costume contest today, but the real surprise was that the real Silver fox out foxed the fake foxes by dressing as Janelle.

We had a great turn out with almost the entire Seattle office in costume.

Scott and Mary “Bearded Lady” Black tied for first place and the best Nagel impersonation went to Corey “Well whaddaya gonna do” St John.

It’s an old pleasure getting a package in the mail from a friend, especially when it contains a new book, the pages cracking and smelling of paint and wood.

So it was a nice surprise to get Guy Kawasaki’s Reality Check in yesterday’s mail.  And nicer still to see that Redfin essays on financial models, talking to the press, and startup life (also featured in the New York Times) became their own chapters in the book, now ranked#209 on Amazon.

Thanks Guy, for including us.  It was a wonder you ever took notice of Redfin when we were only a few goofballs working in David Eraker’s apartment. And it’s exciting to appear in a book that gets manufactured by a big machine, and moved around on forklifts and in cargo ships,  and read by people in subways and hammocks and breakfast counters. Almost the fulfillment of a life-long ambition.

Some day, I’m going to see a guy falling asleep on a plane with this book in his lap, and I’ll tell him Hey! pay attention! There’s some good stuff in there…