I'm your realtor. Please be my friend!

If you ask me, there's a certain amount of magical thinking in the Web real estate space these days, which may mean that we're warming up for a March, 2000-esque bubble burst. Anecdotally, you read folks like Brad, over at Inman blog, saying that he's seeing a volume of business plans being foisted on him by startups is "comparable to 2000." There are other harbingers as well, like the abundance of patently hare-brained sites trying to get buzz going around well-thumbed over ideas, like online property listings.

Take, for example, NeighborhoodNetwork.com, a Minneapolis/St. Paul-focused site that bills itself as a "revolutionary Realtor sponsored network that enables homeowners to maximize their return on investment in their single largest asset...their home." Maximize it how? It's not really clear yet -- Neighborhoodnetwork.com hasn't filled in its Mission or FAQ pages. However, the idea appears to be that you, the homeowner, working through a broker, massage your home's MLS information and post pictures of your house. So, basically, we're talking about slide shows to accompany MLS listings? And that's new because....?

I guess the new bit is supposed to be this quasi-social networking concept of "neighborhood news" that homeowners can add. I can't see the page because, well, I don't own a home in Minneapolis-St. Paul, but I'm presuming this is all about agents mining the brainshare of area homeowners so they provide you with the local "context" about home listings that's the secret sauce in so many R.E. 2.0 business plans.

Ignoring the ham-fisted Java programming and maps integration that gives neighborhoodnetwork.com an eerie "Windows 3.1" feel, why would you do this? Their argument is that Neighborhoodnetwork makes it easier for your house to get "visibility" and to sell, when you're ready to do so. The page's logo "Where market time is all the time" says it all -- rather than endure the torture of anonymity while you live in your home with no plans to sell for, say, 15 or 20 years, you're supposed to strike up a friendship with an agent, then piggy back on their social network, providing a steady stream of photos, updates and neighborhood dirt in the hopes that a "power buyer" swoops in with a great offer? It's kind of a strange take on Zillow's Make Me Move, but without the tidy conceptual packaging that the MMM feature has.

My prediction: three years from now, we'll be writing about the great Web 2.0 crash and the biggest Web 2.0 flops. The picked over body of at least one R.E. 2.0 site will be on the pile (Trulia? Redfin? Zillow?) Alas, a site like NeighborhoodNetwork.com won't get big enough to even be recognized.