The ActiveRain Addiction

I was just reading Todd Clark's post Forced withdrawals from ActiveRain suck! - R.I.P. Henry (Members Only) and it reminded me of something that happened Sunday night that is fairly amusing in retrospect.  I'm sure me real-time Twitter posts on it were fairly amusing especially since it was me typing into a vacuum as everyone was asleep.

Anyways Sunday night we were scheduled to put up a bunch of new code for ActiveRain onto our servers to add some enhancements and fix a slough of bugs.  This release was scheduled to begin at 12:00 (PST) and last about an hour, hopefully within the window of least usage on ActiveRain.  Literally as I was logging into the servers at 11:57, to assist our developer Diego with this I heard a thunderous BANG.  My lights go off, then my Internet connection dies, a transformer down the street had blown.

So I scrambled around trying to locate my iPhone to contact Diego.  Ok, actually being the new Twitter addict I am my first action was to Twitter some muffled profanity and THEN try to contact Diego.  To make a long story short I ended up having to drive 15 minutes down 405 into our office where there was power and Internet to help with the release and didn't make it back into bed until about 4:00 AM in the morning.  Sometime outages come at the most unfortunate times.

One of our developers Jorgen Hahn (aka Matthew McConaughey's little bro, aka the guy who fixed spellcheck) and the developer who did and will be doing most of the work on "New Localism" is now up visiting the ActiveRain offices.  The resemblance to Mr. McConaughey isn't quite a striking now that he's got a little scruff on his face, but it was sure working as a good line when we were out in Vegas a month ago.

Seattle may prove to be information overload to him compared to his home state on Kansas. But don't worry, we've got him chained to a desk now, so he's not going anywhere for a while.

You've all heard the term that has gotten bantered around during our ongoing financial crisis, "Too big to fail".  Basically the concept that a particular company maybe too big and have too big of an impact to be allowed to fail so it should be bailed out, regardless of the collateral damage.  Personally I'm not a big of the concept because almost always what happens in the company that gets bailed out continues down the same path creating a much larger future hazard.

A former FED official William Poole publish and Op-Ed piece yesterday very eloquently making the case of why the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not only too big to fail but may now be "Too big to survive"  [Full article] 

There are more general economic reasons for liquidating Fannie and Freddie, the biggest being that it is very dangerous to maintain such a large role in any market for only two operators. Markets work best when numerous firms compete against each other.

And then there is moral hazard. Knowing they had a federal backstop, Fannie and Freddie held too little capital and the market financed their activities at interest rates very close to those enjoyed by the government. Now we are living through the result. Does it make sense to reconstitute them so that they can engage in a repeat performance?

We've put ourselves into the position where we are dependent on two massive entities with a checkered past of Enronish accounting scandals and shady management who are run them more like highly leveraged hedge funds (reaping massive bonuses along the way) than responsible GSE's.  Even according to their own accounting, which is rather cooked to put it lightly these giants are technically insolvent.  The total bill handed to tax payers to bail them out will almost certainly run into the hundreds of billions as opposed to the $25B congressional estimate.  Yet at the same time we are now so dependent on them, failure would be disaster for not just the housing market but our whole economy. Recession?  More like depression 2.0

So invariably they will be bailed out.  A few more hundred billion will be piled onto Debt Mountain, our taxes will go up, long term interest rates will be forced up, external markets will continue to loose confidence in the great American economic engine, and a handful of executives will retire to their yachts and multi-million dollar mansions to smoke cigars and talk about the good old times.  We know it will happen, so the best we can do it try and not repeat the same mistake.  I'm with Poole, it's too risky to allow Fannie and Freddie to survive in the long term.

Ok, I'm writing this post of help an ActiveRain member I met down at Inman Connect in San Francisco.  Ok scratch that, I'm simply being self serving in trying to protect my "minor investment" in getting to see some juicy pig kissing photos :)

Heather Elias was nominated to participate in the annual Kiss a Pig Contest at the Loudon County Fair. 

I’m tasked with raising money to benefit the Loudoun County Fair grounds, including the upkeep of the barns and buildings and funding youth programs and scholarships. I have until the final night of this year’s fair, August 2nd, to raise as much as I can.

Here is the fun part…the contestant that raises the most money gets to lock lips with a pig at 6:30 pm, Saturday, August 2nd! Each dollar I raise is a vote for me. I’d love to have your support with this! (And yes, you are all invited to come witness…if I win, I will post the picture here for everyone to see!)

She's now accepting online Paypal donations

Ok, for the longest time the interface for posting blogs or rather putting posts into groups has been bugging me.  There was just too many fields and checkboxes on the screen.  So, I decided to make a change last week to it that is going live with our various other bug fixes after midnight tonight.  I thought I'd preemptively post about it as to not freak any Rainer's out when some controls have been moved around.

The functionality is still essentially the same, but it's now using to some lists that expand and collapse to limit the number of things on the screen at once. 

Nothing selected:

Adding posts to Localism:

Better labeled, and the region selection controls are hidden until you add a post to Localism, because that's the only place the data gets used.

Adding posts to Channels:

Adding posts to Groups:

There's also been lots of request for the ability to add a post to an outside blog, or to Localism without it showing up on the members blog at ActiveRain.com  That is something we are debating and may add the ability to do in the near future.

Prior to the official start of the Inman Connect conference this last week, there was the RE Bar camp about blogging and social media in the real estate industry.  At the conclusion of the day "trading cards" featuring about 75 attendees who'd sent in photos where handed out by the guys/gals from Real Seekr and RealEstateZebra.com  Each person featured on a card had carefully been given a super hero name and special power, and on the back of each card was a short bio and contact information for the person. For example we had Jeff Turner (The Facilitator), Brian Block (The Dead President), Jay Thompson (The Gambler), etc.

These cards then got passed around throughout the Inman Connect Conference as everybody tried to put together their set of real estate superhero trading cards.  One of them even ended up on ebay.  This fits into the idea that sometimes the best way to promote yourself is to promote other people.  Especially in the web where information travels so fast and we have things like Google Alerts, if you talk about someone they will almost instantly know, and if it's good will usually feel inclined to reciprocate.

* Photo by Rails Life - "The premier online light rail experience"

So I was unpacking my back from the San Francisco Inman Connect conference, going through business cards, other marketing material and such.  I picked up a piece of paper with partial survey results from The Center For Real Estate & Social Technologies' blog survey which was handed out at the REBAR camp and had a laugh.  Here's the results from one question.

As a whole, real estate bloggers received a median of 7 total comments in May 2008.

• ActiveRain users received a median of 30 total comments.
• Blogger users received a median of 1 total comment.
• Moveable Type/TypePad users received a median of 1 total comment.
• Other platform users received a median of 4 total comments.
• Wordpress users received a median of 8 total comments.

Removing ActiveRain from the mix, the average number of comments per post was 1.85.

I already knew we were a social bunch around here, but damn...

Now that people are "recovering" from the Inman Connect/Bloggers Connect conference this last week in San Francisco, all the pictures are making it up onto Flickr and other photo sharing sites.  Literally everyone there had a camera or other photo capture device.  So, here's your chance to see many ActiveRain members in a whole new light :) 

San Francisco Connectism 2008 Photo Pool

Believe it or not these events are actually highly educational, just the after conference socializing makes for much better pictures.  Yes, we tend to have a lot of fun at these things.  I already can't wait for the next Inman Connect conference in NYC next January.

If you've got pictures on Flickr from this event and have not added them into the photo pool, you should so we've got them all in one place.

Somewhat ironically given my background with technology tend not to be a bleeding edge adopter.  Most people I know have more electronic gadgets on them at anyone time than I have in my whole house.  I sent my first text message EVER when I broke down and got an iPhone about 6 months ago.  Yes, I know gasp!!!

But, I've finally decided to make the plunge and join Twitter.  There goes any hope of productivity.  I've always found Twitter very fascinating, and have been looking at ways to integrate more closely into ActiveRain to provide a much more real-time interactive experience.  I've just avoided jumping into the pool myself up til now. I guess I just like being able to tune out from technology in my personal life.

If your curious my Twitter ID is ActiveRain_Matt

Update: Twitter ID is now Timu_Matt

This evening the US Treasury just announced their rescue plan for mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which combined insure over $5T in mortgages and are currently accounting for the majority of all mortgage lending taking place.  The three main points of the rescue plan:

1. The US Treasury with extend additional lines of credit to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

2. Pending Congressional approval the US Treasury will purchase equity (either preferred or common stock) in Fannie and Freddie.

3. The Federal Reserve will open the discount window allowing Fannie and Freddie access to short term borrowing from the Federal Reserve.

While I'm VERY much anti-bailout, the simple fact is Fannie and Freddie are truly too big to fail, and the implications of their failures would be almost unimaginable.  The problem with this is at the same time they are almost too big to save, the true cost of US tax payers will at a minimum be several hundred billion, due to the massive size of their portfolios. Yes, in direct contridiction to claims made by these companies and some regulatory agencies these companies are already insolvent.

One of the key questions now is how does the bond market react to this rescue plan as it's going to require substantially more borrowing by the US government and with the US Treasury purchasing equity basically implies now that Fannie and Freddie stock will be part of the collateral behind US Treasury debt (Eeekkk).  There is a potential (I don't know how big) the bond market could respond by selling off hard as there is a flight away from long term US Treasury debt, which would substantially ramp interest rates.  We'll probably know the reaction pretty soon though.

Treasury statement on Fannie and Freddie

US Government Stops in to Rescue Mortgage Giants