If you’ve used the site in the past couple of weeks, you may have noticed that PadMapper recently got nominated for a Webby Award for best Real Estate site! We were pretty excited about this since our team is tiny compared to most real estate sites (it’s me and a summer intern), and the Webbies are one of the more prestigious awards that a website can win. At first we didn’t think we could actually win the People’s Voice popularity contest against a big company like Zillow, but at 13.5 days into a 14-day voting period, we’d gotten 37% of the votes in the Real Estate category, 5 percentage points ahead of the second place contender Zillow, and 12 percentage points ahead of the third place contender Apartment List. We’d gotten an outpouring of love from users and things were all around pretty great (thanks everyone).

Then at 12PM on Thursday, with 12 hours of voting to go, the Webby Awards decided close the doors and hide the percentages. The stated reason was to keep the anticipation high until they officially announced the winners 5 days later.

We were bummed that we wouldn’t get to see the end of the race, but then around 4PM, we figured out how to see the percentages again! Whether intentional or not, the voting site was set up such that if we logged out and logged back in again in the Chrome browser using Facebook login, we could see the voting breakdowns again. Logging in and out to look at voting results is a pain, though, so when we saw the percentages were basically the same as 4 hours before, we went back to work on more productive projects. Since the voting had basically stabilized to a ~1-2% fluctuation per day due to the large number of votes from the long voting period and because there were only 8 hours left for voting, we were feeling good about PadMapper’s chances of winning the popular vote. We were in such a good mood that we made ourselves lamb chops for dinner. With ice cream!

Then at 10:40PM, we got curious and we peeked again at the voting results. We were still in first place, but Apartment List had pulled up dramatically. We smelled something fishy. We’re not usually the suspicious type, but we’d had a bad experience dealing with Apartment List before, so we decided to track the voting closely.

Here is where things get crazy. Watch closely.

Below are the voting breakdowns for the Webby Awards Real Estate Category at various points on the last day of voting for the top 3 contenders, all times in PDT:

Needless to say, we were a little emotional for the 50 minutes between 10:40 and 11:30. First crossing our fingers because the race was so tight, then calling “Foul!” on the couch in our living room. By the end, it was like getting to the end of the first Game of Thrones book and, all of a sudden, [redacted] lost his [redacted]! Then as now, we were shocked and unhappy.

Math says that new votes for Apartment List alone in those 50 minutes accounted for at least 7% of all votes in the contest over the 2-week contest. That’s 7% of the votes in 0.2% of the contest time. Aside from this sheer volume of votes, 5 other things seemed fishy:

A) The movement observed happened after 10:40PM on the West Coast. That means it was 1:40AM on the East Coast, on a weeknight.
B) Throughout this flurry of activity, Apartment List was the only site to gain in percentage, and PadMapper and Zillow remained 5% apart at all times.
C) The pace of Apartment List’s gains was linear over the course of the 50 minutes.
D) The movement suddenly stopped at 11:30PM with Apartment List at a 3% lead, 30 minutes before voting officially closed.
E) A quick check on Apartment List’s Twitter and Facebook pages showed no activity in the last 6 hours. No promoting, no calls for votes, nothing.

The total rise from their previous days’ numbers represent a roughly 50% increase in the total number of votes over the number they received in the previous two weeks, despite having next to no social media buzz on the last day.

So here are some guesses at how this could have happened:

1) Lots of avid Apartment List fans suddenly discovered the contest in its final hour and voted at 2AM on the East Coast and 11PM on the West Coast on a Thursday night, at a constant linear pace. Then suddenly no more votes for the last half hour of the contest.
2) Lots of people halfway across the world where it was daytime suddenly discovered the contest in its final hour and voted, at a constant pace, for a website that only serves the US.
3) Someone created a bot that pre-registered for a bunch of fake Twitter accounts and used those to vote for Apartment List.
4) Someone did the human equivalent and used Mechanical Turk or another form of cheap labor to buy votes for an hour or two using fake accounts.

The first two don’t seem very likely.

Only the people at the Webby Awards have the voting logs, but based on the data points we showed above, our best estimate is that the voting distribution over time probably looked something like this (with minor fluctuations):

Sadly, the voting is over, and the results may be set the way they ended up above. We ate a too-early celebratory meal, then we prayed that we could still win, then it seems that a bot or something else came and bulldozed over us with a truckload of fake votes. It’s been an interesting exercise to study the voting pattern of this situation. Whereas most social network-driven activity probably builds in a Poisson-shaped distribution, the votes for Apartment List were added linearly, with a sudden halt at 11:30PM. We hope that the administrators of the Webby Awards will disqualify the almost certainly fake votes and we’ll regain first place, but we haven’t received a response from the admins about this yet.

What makes this whole voting mess more troubling to people who don’t give a fig about our winning an award is that decision-making is increasingly based on internet reviews or votes. The aggregate opinion of the masses is often viewed as more accurate or trustworthy than that of a single reviewer in a magazine, since we expect that we may have different preferences from a single reviewer, but if everyone likes something, we probably will too. This event shows that an aggregate opinion online may actually be easier to fake than a single detailed review. This other story posted less than a week ago about a man being duped by fake reviews for a moving company on Yelp demonstrates that this isn’t always so harmless.

We are left to ponder on the broader question of the pitfalls of Internet voting and the necessity of transparency in things involving voting. If the Webby Awards had not decided to hide the voting distribution in the last hours of voting, would the perpetrator have risked exposure and still pulled this off? Or would s/he have simply done it in a more subtle way?

As a final note, if you decide to write about this, please don’t link to Apartment List as a result of this post. This event shouldn’t lead to an SEO windfall.

UPDATE: Thanks to those of you who pointed me to a blog post from a few days ago by Apartment List – the explanation they provide is that they asked people not to confirm their email addresses after voting, and instead forward the confirmations to them so they could confirm them near the end. That would explain this strange voting pattern, but I’m skeptical, since their public voting campaigns didn’t mention anything about this convoluted step, and I think the number of people they would have had to get to do this privately would have needed to be very large. The Webby admins doubtless have a record of when the votes were originally cast, though, and if it is legitimate, it’s a pretty neat trick to avoid counter voting drives.

UPDATE #2: PadMapper won the Webby for best Real Estate site! Still no response from them about the People’s Voice side of things on whether they checked out the votes, though.

UPDATE #3: Thanks to commenter Mike, who dug up a contest they ran for votes in exchange for a chance to win an iPad. Not as shady as running a bot or hiring people directly, but still basically buying votes. It doesn’t seem to have been extremely successful, though (39 comments from people who voted), and their directions don’t mention not clicking the confirmation email, so I don’t think this explains the vote spike in the last two hours. It seems to have been taken down, which is a bit suspicious. Here’s the cached copy: Cached contest page

This is an idea that’s been banging around in my head for a long time (and a number of you have mentioned it to me also, so thanks for kicking me in the butt): how to put the few places you really care about being close to on the map, and how can you get a sense for the scale of things.

The solution to both problems that I just rolled out is called “My Places”. The idea is that you can add your workplace, your girlfriend’s place, your school, your favorite gym, whatever to the map as a special blue pin to remind you where it is. Then, every time you look at a listing bubble, there will be a tab with a list of all your places, and the time it would take to drive and walk there (color coded, green for close, yellow for medium, red for far). The travel times will also show up in the side bar that shows up next to the original listing when you click through to it.

If you want to add a place or remove one, there are three places that you can do so – on the My Places tab on a listing bubble, on the little My Places menu in the upper left of the map, or on the original listing on the PadMapper sidebar.

It’s a pretty simple idea, but I hope it will be useful to all of you. I decided to push it out rather than wait until it was completely polished so that I could collect people’s impressions about it without committing too much time to polishing the wrong thing, so please let me know your feedback if you have any! Is it useful? Useless? I can be reached at padmapper@gmail.com.

Thanks a lot, and happy hunting!
Eric

PS: 30-odd hours left for voting on the Webby’s. Please help PadMapper win it! Vote Here

This came as a rather large surprise to me, but PadMapper’s been nominated for a Webby award! For those of you who aren’t web geeks, The Webby Awards are as close as internet folks have to an awards ceremony like the Oscars. It started back in the dark ages of the internet (1996), and has honored many websites, huge and small. This year, I think Pinterest was nominated for like 10 of them (I may not be exaggerating). Good job guys

There are two awards in each category, and five nominees per category. One of the awards is decided by the judges in their secret chamber, but the other is awarded based on the results of an online vote. Also in the running is Zillow. They seem like a good group of people and all, but you should probably vote for me instead, because I am a more good group of people. And it would probably mean a lot to my parents. And a lot more people know about Zillow, so random people will vote for them.

You may have already seen the svelte black bar at the top of the site. If you have, and you’ve voted, you’re a great person and I appreciate it. If not, you still have a chance to redeem yourself by voting here: Click Me!. If you don’t, I’ll never know, and it doesn’t really make you a bad person, but you might feel bad if you ever meet me. So do it for selfish reasons if nothing else.

Now back to your regularly scheduled apartment hunting.

Eric

There’s a journalist for a major magazine that’s interested in getting pictures and stories from some people who found places in the East Village in NYC on PadMapper. If that sounds like something you’d be interested in, email me at padmapper@gmail.com and we’ll go from there.

Many of you have asked for this, so I decided to bump it up on the todo list. You can now take notes on the side bar of the listing! When you do, it should automatically change the note on your favorites list and the bubble back on the map. Pretty nifty, eh?

Listing Sidebar with Notes

I wanted to do this when I rolled out the sidebar originally, but it proved more difficult than I first thought. The biggest reason for that was that you need to be logged in to take notes, and that meant being able to log in on a listing page, and not just from the map. When you log in on a listing page, the map also needs to learn that you’ve logged in, and update accordingly. The solution I’ve come up with isn’t completely foolproof, but I think it should work 99% of the time. If it ever doesn’t work, a refresh of the page should set everything right.

In other news, I’ve been busy on many parts of the site. PadLister (http://www.padlister.com), PadMapper’s sister site devoted to landlord tools (listing syndication, online rental applications, and other things) got a major facelift from my friend, the very talented designer Tracy Osborn, who works on matching people up with beautiful wedding invitations by day.

Also, the online rental applications received some major updates, so more landlords should be interested in using them.

Finally, it strikes me that I never officially announced one of the biggest changes to the site in a while – there is now the ability to make a renter profile, complete with a verified copy of your credit score. This profile inserts itself into your emails and answers the basic questions that you have to go through with every landlord: are you employed, do you have pets, when you’d like to move in, when you’re available to visit, and so on. It should hopefully save you a lot of back and forth.

Renter Profile, with Credit Score

I hope you all find the new additions useful!

Happy hunting!
Eric

PadMapper’s had GoDaddy as its domain registrar for at least a year now, but they just publicly endorsed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) for some reason (a bill under discussion in the US Congress which would severely harm the state of the internet in a probably futile attempt to stamp out piracy of music, movies, etc). I won’t do business with companies that knowingly support something as deeply flawed as SOPA, so PadMapper is now changing registrars, and I would encourage anyone with a site on GoDaddy to do the same.

Eric

Sorry for not blogging in a while – I’ve been releasing updates this whole time, though.

Tonight I released quite a few updates to the user interface. The main goals were to unclutter some of the parts that had become cluttered (filters and listing bubbles, I’m looking at you), as well as to generally beautify things a bit, and make the interface easier to learn. PadMapper should feel a little softer now. A little more refined, maybe.

I’m not done, though, and I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff coming from the backend.

Do you like the changes? Despise them? Wish I’d go further on some things? Please let me know! padmapper@gmail.com

A user just emailed me about adding a filter to weed out those heartbreaking listings that are amazing, but at the bottom ask for only females. I’m well acquainted with the problem – you generally read that part after you’ve already fallen in love with the place, and it’s a pretty crappy feeling.

Fortunately, PadMapper can help!

How? Just put -female in your keywords filter (female with a minus sign in front of it), and it will weed out every listing where the word female appears in the text of the listing. I can’t think of many other instances where someone would put the word female in an otherwise sexless description except to exclude males, so this shouldn’t throw out much wheat with the chaff.

Happy hunting!
Eric

It turns out that I’m pretty bad at keeping up with things, and this blog is no exception. Since my last post, I’ve released a bunch of new stuff, but never got around to posting about them here. So now I’m going to fix that.

Most recently, I released Collaboration. This makes it so that you can invite someone else (or multiple people) via email to share pretty much everything about the apartment hunt with you – the stuff they’ve looked at will turn grey for you, their favorites will show up on your favorites list, their notes will sit below your notes, and so on. It’s pretty cool, but I’m sure it needs some tweaking, so please let me know if there’s anything about it that doesn’t work well or any design decisions that I’ve made that don’t really make sense. Also, if you really wish it did something that it doesn’t, that’s good to know as well.

Besides that, there’s been another couple releases of the iPhone app to try to bring its quality up a bit (some of you seemed unhappy about it, and upon further review, rightfully so). Hopefully it’s at a good point with this upcoming release. There are still a couple of changes that I’d like to make, but some of them are more time consuming than I have time for at the moment.

The Yelp restaurants/grocery stores/cafe’s/etc overlay was moved to a little bar on the bottom.

And a host of random improvements and bug fixes which should make things smoother overall.

Happy hunting!
Eric

A number of you have asked me why I don’t add the Google transit overlay to the map. I wish I could, it’s really well done, but my searches haven’t turned up anything but people saying that they don’t share it with people using the Maps API. It’s unfortunate, but c’est la vie.

Just kidding, that just means it’s time to try my own hand at it . I took the past couple days to make some programs that work together to automatically generate subway/trolley/light rail route maps from publicly available transit schedules.

It’s not exactly finished, but I’ve decided to release this initial version to gauge the reaction, and whether there’s any outcry at its shortcomings. One of the big ones is that if multiple lines share the same stops, the lines that represent them on the map will just sit on top of each other, and you can only see the top one. Another is that you may notice some wonky behavior with some of the lines. Many of you know these cities better than I do, so if you see anything that seems wrong to you, let me know.

To activate the overlay, open up the Filter box, and then open up the Super Secret Advanced Features, and check the checkbox next to Mass Transit Overlay. It currently shows only subway, light rail, and trolleys – bus routes would have been overwhelming. I have another project in mind that will take those into account, though.

The transit overlay is available in a few major cities at the moment. Please let me know if there are any big ones that I’ve missed, or small ones where rail-based mass transit plays a big role. Also, if you spot any bugs – I know about one or two, but there are probably more that I’m not aware of.

Happy hunting!