Friday morning I come into the office and get going with my routine.  Check email, run disk clean-up, check twitter via twhirl, fill up the water bottle, and the coffee cup.  Friday usually means a gathering of punk, hip-hop and classic rock (courtesy of Pandora) whispers from my speakers just loud enough so I can hear.  As I open the web to upload Jim’s September Phoenix Market Review I notice it’s been a week since we’ve posted an article here on our blog!  Man, so much has happened this week, I can’t believe it slipped by without any updates.  5 topics have stacked up.  For some reason my thought process decides it’s better to include all 5 topics in a “week in review” type post, rather than 5 individual articles.  (Let me know if you make all the way to the bottom

Winners!

Thank you to the 750 members of the Phoenix Association of REALTORS® who voted in this years’ election.  Marge and Jim have been elected to the Board of Directors for the Arizona Association of REALTORS®!  They won the election by a landslide! (<– I made that up.)  Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to all who could vote!

ARMLS

It must have been an exciting week to be an ARMLS employee – two news worthy stories.  Clareity Security and WAVE were both introduced this week, but only one made it to Friday.  Based on the wait time for their help desk, it seems like Tuesday’s security update wasn’t as smooth as everyone had hoped (myself included).  I’d like to address the question about the security update I’ve been hearing the most and then we’ll talk WAVE.

Clareity Security is an mls security company (Scottsdale, Arizona roots) whose purpose is to help keep sensitive data secure.  On Tuesday ARMLS rolled out a new login page for flexmls – provided by Clareity Security.  According to a Clareity Security employee on twitter, the new page had issues with the web browser Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).  As of yesterday (followed by the official announcement today), ARMLS returned the login page to the familiar flexmls one.  If you were having login problems Tuesday or Wednesday, it should now be fixed.  However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Clareity login resurface once they get the bugs worked out.

Based on the email from ARMLS leading up to the change, it was clear this new system wasn’t going to allow users to store passwords in their browser.  And based on the questions I’ve been getting, many ARMLS subscribers think this was the only reason for this update.  Not true.  Clareity Security is much more powerful than just preventing you from storing a password.  Check out this paragraph from their website:

“The foundation of the product is an identity profiling engine for aggregating user access data, creating statistical profiles, and detecting anomalies. … The product is unique in its ability to accurately and transparently identify users. Keystroke dynamics makes it possible for the Server to detect account sharing, account takeover, and differences between individual users.”

“Keystoke dynamics makes it possible for the Server to detect account sharing.”  Wow.  Inman News mentions Clareity as they describe the fact everyone’s typing rhythm creates somewhat of a digital fingerprint.  So ARMLS’ new security tool can detect if it’s your rhythm accessing your account or someone else’s. That’s impressive.  No seriously – impressive.  Impressive like bad to the bone. Impressive like being able to find fingerprints on fingers I didn’t know I had.  Bottom line, abide by the rules – don’t share your password.

Amidst the logging in hoopla, ARMLS announced the winner of their “Name our Ezine Contest” appropriately in the first issue of the online magazine – WAVE.  Congratulations to Tony Pomykala FTW (for the win).  WAVE is ARMLS’ latest attempt at getting good, trustworthy, relevant information to their subscriber base.  I’m a fan.  I hope to … ride the WAVE to more understanding of what’s available at ARMLS.  I hope not to … WAVE goodbye to the magazine anytime soon.  It’s going to be hugely valuable as we continue on this …  technology WAVE that will take into the future.  Okay that’s all I got…

Twitter

I’ve set a new avatar over at the John Hall & Associates twitter handle.  If you use twitter, you know how impersonal it is when a company has a logo as their avatar.  Even though I was aware of this, I didn’t really want my picture to be the @johnhallassoc avatar.  Well, I got over it.  And I’m glad I did.  I feel liberated that my tweets now appear to come from a human rather than a John Hall & Associates open house sign.

John Hall & Associates’ Intranet

I got a phone call late last week from WebEx, the company behind our intranet – since the year 2000.  They were happy to let us know that they appreciate our business and that they were going to more than triple our monthly bill.  When I asked about the new features we would receive based on the 333% cost increase… nothing is changing but the cost. So what does that mean to you?

Assuming you are one of the successful agents that works with John Hall & Associates, that means you will be seeing a brand-new intranet towards the end of October.  Bill and I have spent all week evaluating possible solutions (hence the lack of blog updates).  We are confident we’ve found one that will work just fine.  More news on this as we get closer to rolling it out.

Blog Improvements

Blogs are dynamic.  If you have a blog, you know how it goes. If you don’t then you might not know that both the articles and the sidebar(s) are dynamic.  It’s mainly because of the simplicity of bringing new ideas to life.  Case in point, the two new additions to our sidebar.

As you are scrolling down from the top of our blog, the first addition you’ll come across is the button that links you to the download page of our toolbar.  We’ve been getting questions from our agents on how to get the Phoenix Real Estate Toolbar that is installed on our office machines.  My answer before this button was to google it.  That changed this week!

The second addition is to highlight our commenters, you know, the folks who leave comments on these articles.  The 5 most recent commenters will be displayed with their photo (courtesy of gravatar), a link to their website, and a link to the article they commented on.  The goal is to give a little more thanks to those who participate and hopefully attract some new ones!

There you have it, our week in review.
Have a good weekend,
Phil