week 8, thing 19 (web 2.0 awards)

From the web 2.0 awards, I looked at the following sites: Colorblender, Farecast and Zillow



Colorblender



On this site, users select a color and the colorblender generates 5 coordinating colors. This site would be great for home decorating or even creating a website. The site was easy to use and I am sure that it would be even easier to use if you understood HTML color codes.



Farecast



This site predicts pricing of airline tickets based on the fares and trends of the industry for the last 90 days. It will tell you if you should buy now or wait for reductions. You cannot purchase tickets through the Farecast but will be redirected to the airline carrier's website or given the option to purchase tickets with another site like Expedia. This site gives you a variety of ways to search and allows you to change your flight plans easily. It had lots of charts and graphs. It also let you chart the fares for a 30 day period, so that you could find the cheapest days to fly. It is kind of inconvenient that you cannot purchase tickets directly from the site, but I would definitely use this site next time I need plane tickets.





Zillow



Zillow offers users real estate information. You can type in a specific address, a street, neighborhood or city and zillow will produce estimated real estate prices. It also tells you which homes are for sale and which homes sold recently. If you chose a specific property it will chart its value and sales for the last 10-years and also offer you details about the home (i.e. how many bedrooms, baths, etc.). The images are very cool on this site too. All of the areas, I looked at had a satellite image of the area, you can see bodies of water, streets and even pools in back yards. Some areas even have "bird's eye images" using Microsoft Virtual Earth. I don't know much about Real Estate, but I think that this is a great site for potential home buyers and sellers. It would be a great way to get an idea of the housing market. I am not sure of the accuracy of all information. I looked up some known properties and the information about some of homes was incorrect.