Here’s what’s new: Facebook will today start rolling out a revamp of its newsfeed that will make it more like a social magazine, weighting big pictures and important stories.

Yes, yet again, Facebook is redesigning a core feature and taking away options users have come to expect. Instead of the “top news” and “most recent” toggle options, users will see a newsfeed with the most important items since they last visited Facebook. So if they incessantly check the site, they’ll see new stuff every time. If they go out of town for a week, they’ll see highlights from the time they were gone.

And lest people feel as though the pace of Facebook is slowing down, the site is also offering an alternate view, one that will constantly scroll down a sidebar at the side of the page. This “Ticker” — which some users have had in tests for a while now — shows a live feed of nearly every action a users’ friends are taking across the site, including likes, statuses and comments.

Meanwhile, the size of photos displayed in the newsfeed will double. Larger photos is probably the change users will notice the most, Facebook VP Engineering Mike Schroepfer said in an interview today.

Schroepfer said he disagreed with my assertion that Facebook seems to be overcomplicating and expanding its feature set. “The new news feed is, in our mind, a simplification,” he said.

“The thing I personally find exciting is realizing three quarters of a billion people use the product and that range of experience can be someone with 15 friends to someone with tens of thousands of subscribers who uses the site for four hours every day,” he added. “We are adding some features but trying to do our best to simplify what we can and make them optional.”

Maybe next year if Facebook has this much stuff to launch it should just schedule a two-day f8 conference!

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement. 

Netflix’s dramatic growth in user base and market cap have had a lot to do with the company anticipating market changes and making audacious bets, but it has been relatively plodding and hesitant about getting social.

Netflix explained in the shareholder letter (PDF) accompanying its quarterly earnings report that its Facebook integration will accompany an effort to split household accounts into multiple personal accounts.

In part because of the company’s history as a DVD mailing service, a Netflix account is affiliated with a particular address. That’s also the way traditional television providers measure their market: In terms of households.

But online video, Netflix notes, “is more naturally individual, since it is watched on personal screens like phones, tablets, and laptops, as well as on shared large screen televisions.”

In addition to helping identify discrete people within a household, Facebook integration would presumably allow Netflix to help users do things like share their personal viewing history in their newsfeed and recommend videos to friends. Understanding social networks could improve Netflix’s famously honed recommendation algorithm. It might also be an opportunity for Netflix to create social viewing experiences.

Currently, Netflix lacks much in the way of social features; it had yanked a previous effort to offer social sharing last year after saying that relatively few subscribers used it.

However, the company has recently staffed up for a renewed social effort.

Mike Hart, previously Netflix’s director of engineering for APIs, is now director of engineering for social. Hart told Fast Company in November that Netflix sees social as an international user acquisition strategy and an opportunity to avoid disruption by a competitor that is more social.

Netflix also appears to view personal accounts as an opportunity to charge more money. The company said in the shareholder letter that later this year it will start offering new account options that include multiple simultaneous streams. (So, for instance, you could stream TV episodes in the bedroom on your iPad while your spouse watches a movie in the living room through the Roku.) The streaming-only plan Netflix recently launched costs $7.99 (which some industry watchers say is too cheap) and allows just one stream at a time.

Netflix noted in the letter that its new grand internal vision is to target the number of active mobile phones in an area, rather than the number of households (though that might be a bit ambitious in places where it’s common for people to have more than one phone!).

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Is it Facebook? Twitter? Personal email? Work email? A news site or aggregator? A corporate collaboration tool or chat room?

It’s a minor detail perhaps, but something I love asking people. Your bleary-eyed self may speak the truth about the utility you find in these sites and the loyalty they command.

(Personally, I’m not always a creature of habit; I mix it up. My All Things D email and our internal Socialcast stream are high up on the list. Facebook and Twitter usually come a little later in the morning scramble.)

There’s a user poll going around on Facebook at the moment that a couple of people from disparate parts of my life have taken, so it’s been popping up in my newsfeed. The poll asks, “Which do you check first each day: Facebook, or your Email?”

So far, with 518 responses, email is pulling 54.1 percent of the vote. This is in a survey of presumably very active Facebook users who would take the time to fill out the poll (which is part of the beta Facebook Questions product). What about you?

P.S. Quora has a question on the matter as well, with fewer but more diverse and detailed responses.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

In a note published on his Facebook profile, Agarwal said:

I am extremely inspired by the changes that Facebook has affected throughout the Internet ecosystem and how it has changed user expectations about great products. Our Platform has created a unique set of opportunities for building products on the foundations of the social graph. It will be the cornerstone of many future disruptions, some of which I hope to accelerate.

Agarwal’s projects have included Facebook newsfeed, search, ads, user commerce and services infrastructure. He said his last day would be Dec. 3.

Facebook spokesperson Larry Yu said via email, “After nearly five-and-a-half years, Aditya Agarwal has decided to leave the company. Aditya has been a key contributor since Facebook’s early days and while he’ll be greatly missed, we wish him all the best as he considers his next adventure.”

Agarwal did not specify what his next project will be. His wife, Ruchi Sanghvi, was Facebook’s first female engineer and left the company in August. (The two joined Facebook as a couple in mid-2005 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon.)

Agarwal is not Facebook’s only director of engineering; others with that title include Andrew “Boz” Bosworth and Robert Johnson.

Facebook has given employees the option to cash out some of their shares through secondary markets, and plus, early members of the team have at this point just been there a long time. Meanwhile Facebook has put new people, both hires and acqhires, in charge. As I wrote in a feature for GigaOM a few months ago:

Staying at a tech startup for more than four years–the default stock option vesting schedule–is a rare thing, but it seems notable that at 6-year-old Facebook, many early and influential employees have moved on, several of them recently. Facebook is an unusual employer, having been incredibly successful while steering clear of the public markets longer than expected. Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure.

Although it’s obviously hard to see your comrades leave, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had an interesting and somewhat counterintuitive explanation for the stream of people leaving the company in an interview he gave about a year ago:

“We’re not pretending we’re building a company that hackers are going to want to work at forever,” Zuckerberg said, pointing to former employees like Steve Chen (who stayed at Facebook for only a short time before starting YouTube). Zuckerberg added his hope was to build a place where people could learn to build high-impact products–”a great hacker institution in the long term.”

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my ethics statement.

Making browsers social is a hot project these days. The Facebook-framed RockMelt browser, made by and backed by some of the people responsible for Netscape, launched to much fanfare earlier this month. However, it seems to me completely crazy that someone could launch a “social browser” in this day and age without a mobile component.

Skyfire helps fill that mobile-social gap with some nifty uses of the Facebook API. There are two notable new buttons in the browser, which are prominently displayed despite the small size of a mobile screen.

First, users can click from any Web page to see global popular Facebook Likes for that domain. So in the example portrayed in this demo video, you can see all the recent articles on the New York Times ranked by how much they are being shared by people on Facebook. This is similar to what many companies are doing around analyzing links shared on Twitter (for instance, I wrote about Gravity last week), but it’s rarer to see global analysis of Facebook. A spokesperson for Skyfire said this is based on public Facebook APIs, not a deeper partnership like what Bing has for its social search.

The other new Skyfire button is called “Fireplace,” and it’s a custom newsfeed for any user with only status updates from friends who included shared links. This is somewhat similar to what folks like Flipboard are doing, but without the fancy design. Fireplace breaks out a simple list of what your friends are reading and sharing so you can quickly flip through what they think is interesting.

The Skyfire Facebook edition also includes integration with Twitter and Amazon.

Now, two years later, Zuckerberg will once again take the D stage. And once again, his appearance follows another privacy debacle, another apology and another rejiggering of the company’s privacy safeguards. Let’s see what he has to say about leadership this time around.

Update: See video highlights from Zuckerburg’s interview. We’ve compiled a reel on his answers to privacy questions, and a clip on the inside of the Zucker-hoodie.

Liveblog

4:54 pm: “There are a lot of things to talk about with Mark,” says Kara. “And I think he’s got a lot of guts coming up here.”

4:54 pm: Walt kicks things off by asking about Facebook’s business. It’s based on sharing, but there is this perception that you’re on a course to push people’s information into a position where it’s visible on the Internet. Is that correct?

Zuckerberg: Privacy is very important to us. I think there are some misperceptions. People use Facebook to share and to stay connected. You don’t start off on Facebook being connected to your friends, you’ve got to be able to find them. So having some information available broadly is good for that. Now, there have been misperceptions that we’re trying to make all information open, but that’s false. We encourage people to keep their most private information private. But some of the most basic information, we suggest that people leave public.

4:58 pm: Zuckerberg–We recommend settings for people, and we asked that everyone review their settings and make a choice about what they wanted them to be. We didn’t simply change them….The big feedback that we got was that the privacy settings had become too complex. Over the years we’d just accumulated many, many settings.

4:59 pm: Walt–The real issue here is whether people trust that you are still on board with the idea that they thought you were on board with when they joined: That you will keep the information they want to be private, private. But you’ve done some abrupt things and forced people to do something to maintain their privacy settings. Why are you making me have to take steps to protect my information?

Zuckerberg dodges. Talks about the serendipitous connections that Facebook enables. Offers an anecdote about meeting someone for dinner.

5:03 pm: More on serendipitous connections. Zuckerberg continues with this theme until Walt jumps in and asks him to answer the original question.

5:04 pm: Zuckerberg stresses that people can still control their Facebook information. More than 50 percent of Facebook users have changed their privacy settings at one point. That demonstrates that our users understand the tools, he says. “To me, that’s a signal that on the whole, we’re getting it right and giving people the control they want.”

5:05 pm: Kara–So do you feel this recent backlash against you is unfair? How do you explain the hubbub around this? She notes some old inflammatory college IM messages of his that have been making the rounds lately that suggest he may have a cavalier attitude towards privacy.

Zuckerberg: When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs…. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use.

Kara: But people want to know about you. Do you feel that you’re adequately portrayed?

Zuckerberg seems confounded for a moment. Then recounts his oft-told story of moving to California and being approached with offers to buy the company. Another long rambling answer to a simple question. Finally: “I can’t go back and change the past, I can only do the best that I can do moving forward.”

Kara and Walt again circle back to the issue of privacy. Is Zuckerberg attempting to force his vision of privacy on all of Facebook?

5:08 pm: [My God, Zuckerberg is literally dissolving in a lake of his own sweat. He is visibly flushed, and you can see the beads of sweat rolling down his face. Could this be his Nixon moment?]

Kara sympathizes, suggests he take off the hoodie he’s wearing, “You all right?” she asks. “We’re not even yelling at you…yet.”

Zuckerberg refuses to take off the hoodie. “I never take it off,” he says. Then he wipes the sweat from his brow, looks at the resulting water stain on his arm, says “whoa,” relents and takes it off.

5:10 pm: Kara helps him and then examines the hoodie. Evidently Facebook’s mission statement is printed inside it along with a giant Illuminati-style insignia (“Making the world more open and connected”). “Oh my God. You’re a cult!” jokes Kara, commenting on the emblem inside. Zuckerberg’s obviously relieved that the privacy questions have paused, at least for a moment.

Walt moves on. “So what is instant personalization?”

5:10 pm: Zuckerberg–”We have this strategy where what we’re trying to do is make it possible for everyone to design social apps where their contacts are at the center….What we’re trying to do now is to make it so that people can extend that to the rest of the Web….We’ve made it so that people can build these people-centric Web sites.” These points are buried in a long rambling answer. He’s fumbling here.

5:13 pm: Walt–Why not, when I log on to Facebook, give people the option to use instant personalization instead of automatically personalizing things for them?

Zuckerberg dodges again, then suggests that doing so would create “a lot more friction.”

Walt again tries to get him to answer the question at hand: But shouldn’t people make this decision themselves? Shouldn’t they have to opt in? [C'mon, Mark. Just answer the question. It would be so much easier....Over on Twitter, longtime tech observer Dan Gillmor just wrote: "Walt Mossberg insists on an answer re FB’s unilateral privacy changes; nope, still no answer."]

Opt in versus opt out is part of a balance in sharing, says Zuckerberg. He rambles on for a while before noting some previous Facebook innovations that people rebelled against, that are today viewed as essential to the service. Newsfeed, for example. [At last a decent point.] “My prediction would be a few years from now is that we’ll all look back and wonder why these services weren’t personalized. The world is moving in this direction where everything is designed around people.”

5:17 pm: Kara–What’s your next big goal? What’s on the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon?

It’s tough to follow Zuckerberg’s answer, here. He seems to be replying to another question. He talks a bit about the development of applications. He says that the industry is moving into an age where more services will be built with people at their core.

5:20 pm: Walt, moving on again–What is the social graph? Is it something you control?

Zuckerberg: The idea of the social graph is that if you mapped out all the connections between people in the world it would form this graph, and that’s what we’re doing at Facebook. Once you’ve done that, you can start building services on them and enable this broader platform, build games, etc. A lot of people have characterized the social graph as something that we own or control, but we don’t.

5:22 pm: Kara–So what kind of power does Facebook have in this graph?

Zuckerberg: I think people look to us a the leader in this space. And I think there’s a widely held belief that we’re much closer to the beginning of the space than the end. It would be easy for us to just keep things as they are, but we don’t believe that if we did, we’d be doing the best thing for us or the industry. So we do what we think are the best things, even if they are controversial.

Walt: How does the social graph get monetized?

Relevant advertising, says Zuckerberg. And user engagement. He cites a recent campaign by Starbucks (SBUX), which was evidently quite successful. He says that people are sharing information about brands in the same way they are sharing information about themselves.

5:25 pm: Kara–Who are your competitors in this space?

Zuckerberg: We compete with different companies in different ways. One of the things I try to do as CEO of this company is not make mistakes that other companies make….I make different ones, he jokes. [Given his performance today, one wonders if he's really qualified to be the public face of his company.]

The world is changing so quickly now that I think the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven’t heard of, Zuckerberg continues. So we just need to stay focused on doing what we do and doing at well.

5:27 pm: Kara–You’re going to be CEO of this company when it goes public?

Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Kara: When will that be?

Zuckerberg: I don’t know.

5:28 pm: Some more patter. Then Zuckerberg again circles back to this theme of a Web centered around people. This is obviously his D8 PR bullet point, just as “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” was his bullet point for D6.

Kara: How do you think you’ve changed as a CEO in the past few years?

Zuckerberg: I’ve always just focused on a couple of things. One is having a clear direction. The other is having a good team. Right now, I think we have a clear direction. We’ve got a lot of cool apps and a great platform. On the people side: Just continuing to bring in great people and putting them in positions that they’ll excel at is important. We’re out in the valley recruiting the very best people for the roles we have available in the company. I think as a company, if you get those two things right, then you can do pretty well.

Q&A

Q (from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser): Do you realize that you’ve built at the age of 26 one of the five most important Internet companies in the world? Because of that, people view you differently. How do you deal with that?

A: Maybe I’m in denial. I think our goals haven’t really changed much at all. We don’t think of the company as successful. We know that we have a service that many people use. But it goes back to this concept where I really think we’re just a lot closer to the beginning than the end. Personally, I have a core group of people that I really trust, and that’s what I care about: Those people that share my values and the values of the company.

Q: Who’s your role model? Who would be the best person to run Facebook–aside from you?

A: [Pause] I don’t think I can answer either of those questions. I feel like I learn the most from the people around me now. [Who's your role model? Easy question, Mark. How about "my Mom." ... No real answer.] … I think if something happened to me you could pick any of the people around me and they’d do a great job of running the company. And that’s important because we’re still a very small company.

Q: I’ve heard that you’re going to offer an email platform. Is that true?

A: We’re not building a Web-mail competitor. People already use Facebook for messaging. There are definitely these great services that people use that are full Web-mail clients, but I think the opportunity is more around short-form communications.

Q: How are important decisions made at Facebook?

A: We’re a company where there’s a lot of open dialogue. We have crazy dialogue and arguments. Every Friday, I have an open Q&A where people can come and ask me whatever questions they want. We try to do what we think is right, but we also listen to feedback and use it to improve. And we look at data about how people are using the site. In response to the most recent changes we made, we innovated, we did what we thought was right about the defaults, and then we listened to the feedback and then we holed up for two weeks to crank out a new privacy system.

Q: When it comes to Facebook, what’s your opinion of Flash?

A: We’re agnostic on that issue. I tend to believe more in the Web than apps. The thing that I actually care a lot more about is how you integrate people into all this stuff.

Q: I wonder if you can comment on what it means for Facebook to have mobile apps?

A: Our mobile experience is growing really quickly. It’s well more than 100 million people using Facebook on their phones right now. I think that one of the challenges of mobile is that there’s no standard platform yet. Is it going to be Android, iPhone, HTML apps?

Q: Will you have an iPad app?

A: I assume that we will.

And that’s a wrap!

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

“Instead of wanting a fancy fan page, you want a fancy newsfeed,” said Jeff Widman, the CEO of BrandGlue, a company that helps companies manage their social media. The newsfeed is the basic home screen where Facebook shares status updates from friends and fan pages.

But the problem is that not all of a brand’s updates automatically get passed along to fans. Facebook filters which ones show up, based on a formula that it doesn’t disclose. It’s designed to keep spam and other boring posts out of users’ feeds.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

So are they getting their money’s worth? Maybe–if they’re not spending much more than a double latte per fan.

Each fan is worth an average of $3.60 a year, based on the number of media impressions he or she generates via Facebook users’ “newsfeeds,” according to social media consultancy Vitrue.

AllFacebook explains the math:

If a brand posts to their Facebook Fan Page twice a day and have a million fans, that’s 60M impressions per month in the collective “news feed”. Vitrue used a figure of $5 CPM (Cost per thousand impressions), so 60M impressions would result in $300K/month of media value. I.e., what the brand might have to spend elsewhere to get the same eyeballs. That $300K /month is $3.6M/ year, meaning that with 1M fans, the average value is $3.6 per fan.

Interestingly, Vitrue’s numbers don’t try to account for the secondary impressions fan pages generate, when fans’ friends see their activity. But I’m sure that Facebook, and the vendors who help the social network promote its fan pages, will point that out.

“Facebook, in some ways, is about what people are up to,” Jonathan Miller said during a keynote speech at the ad:tech conference in New York. MySpace, in contrast, “is about what people are into.”

MySpace in recent months has said it plans to focus on its appeal as an entertainment portal, where members can connect with their favorite bands and artists, as it has lost ground to status- and news-feed-heavy Facebook.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

But even though you can use these services without leaving home, many of them still require you to go to a specific Web site — one you wouldn’t necessarily visit regularly. Sites like Gazelle.com and Venjuvo.com that pay cash for old electronics (or just recycle them) aren’t exactly online destinations.

Now one of those ways to unload your stuff involves a Web site you might visit many times a day. A site that has considerable sway in the social-networking world, where over 175 million active users go to share personal stories, photos and videos with hundreds of “friends.”

That’s right, I’m talking about Facebook. Tuesday, the social-networking giant announced its new Facebook Marketplace, Facebook.com/Marketplace, an integrated application powered by Oodle, known for its work with online classified ads. Marketplace uses colorful icons to represent four actions you can take in its app: Sell It; Sell for a Cause; Give it Away; and Ask for It.

Facebook Marketplace users can pick from 12 categories of listings, as well as buy or sell items for a favorite cause.

Oodle granted me early access to the Marketplace app before it became available Tuesday. A friend of mine and I were both set up with test accounts so that we could see one another’s fake Marketplace items and interact with one another within Marketplace; hundreds of Oodle employees also were testing this. (It was fun to see what people offer for sale when they’re just pretending, like one person who offered to sell everything on a colleague’s desk when he was out.)

Facebook’s original iteration of Marketplace started back in 2007, but was geared toward services like housing and jobs. The Oodle-powered Marketplace is merchandise-centric and includes more detailed organization, deeper integration with Facebook, and ways to buy or sell things to raise money for 1.7 million causes.

It still lacks a built-in electronic payment system, such as PayPal or Discover card, for exchanges between users or donations to causes. Instead, Marketplace encourages its users to exchange money however they choose, like traditional classified ads. And that could cause some obvious problems. For instance, if an item were sold for a cause, the seller could later donate the amount via credit card after closing a listing. But there’s no guarantee that the seller will actually do this. Oodle says it will listen to feedback from the Facebook audience and will try to integrate e-payments, if preferred.

Every posted item can include a location, description, category, photo and an explanation of why it’s in the Marketplace. Each item is reviewed by Oodle’s fraud-detection program, which looks for inappropriate content and suspicious activity, and a post could take up to 30 minutes to appear online after you submit it. My posts displayed almost instantly in the Marketplace newsfeed. Users also can opt to publish their posts to their Facebook profiles.

One example of Marketplace’s newly detailed organization comes in its browsing options. The old version of Marketplace had options to browse through jobs and housing, but not specific categories of items for sale. Now, users can browse through 12 categories of specific items including “Home & Garden,” “Baby & Kid Stuff,” “Tickets” and “Musical Instruments.” Items that don’t fit into these 12 categories are put into an “Everything Else” category.

Each item in Marketplace integrates with Facebook’s familiar format, like having its own online “wall” where questions and comments appear. If you’re looking for something in Marketplace by using the “Ask for It” option, you can recruit people to help you find the item by selecting from your list of friends, which works the same way people can suggest Facebook people to friends who might know them. Glancing at an item shows the seller’s profile photo, a link to all of the person’s listings and a brief history of his or her overall Marketplace activity, such as “3 listings in the last month.”

The integration of charitable causes into Marketplace gives supporters new ways to raise money for a favorite group like the World Wildlife Fund or Habitat for Humanity International. On the Marketplace home page, causes are displayed in a right-hand panel with a daily featured cause. This Featured Cause shows who else supports it and how many items you can buy or sell to support it.

Privacy is a natural concern in online marketplaces. By default, your posted listings are visible to any Facebook member in Marketplace. Users can opt to remain anonymous — they’re listed as “Facebook user is selling a bike,” for example. In that case, the only way someone can contact that person is by posting a comment and waiting for the seller to respond.

People who aren’t members of Facebook can see your listings by browsing and searching Marketplace, but they can’t post, comment or contact users. Unlike online marketplaces or services that can be used by anyone, Marketplace requires that users be members of the site to interact with sellers, which can be a downside. Plenty of people who aren’t on Facebook might not want to join the social-networking phenomenon just to offload the old couch gathering dust in the garage.

All user notifications — messages indicated in red at the bottom right of a Facebook page — will reflect friends’ activities in the Marketplace, unless you reset the notifications of the Facebook Marketplace app to not notify you. I suggest doing this, unless you really want to know about all your friends’ activities in Marketplace.

Four color-coded icons represent activities in Marketplace and are useful when reading lists of items at a glance: A green dollar sign represents Sell It and a red heart represents Sell for a Cause, for example. And details about each cause are integrated within Marketplace.

The Oodle-powered Facebook Marketplace is straightforward and well organized, and if you’re a Facebook user, its format will be familiar. If you’re not, and you’re looking for a way to sell or give items away for a charity or otherwise, Marketplace might encourage you to join the giant social network. But its payment program could be made a lot easier with electronic options.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

• Email us at mossbergsolution@wsj.com. Find this and other columns and videos online free at the All Things Digital Web site: http://solution.allthingsd.com

This week, I tested Trulia.com, a real-estate site that’s geared toward helping people who are ready to buy. Trulia combines a simple approach to real estate that anyone can grasp, with enough market stats to excite number-crunching types. It also offers a community where regular users can ask 200,000 real-estate professionals questions without fear of being hounded by agents because their emails are hidden.

An iPhone app from Trulia.com uses GPS to find nearby open houses.

Trulia has been around since 2005, but started out as a site that only posted local real-estate listings in California and New York. After expanding to the national market in 2006, it added other features like pricing heat maps (color-coded to indicate prices in an area), comparable listings, an online community and automatically generated newsfeeds about specific properties and areas. Last summer, Trulia went mobile with a free iPhone app that uses GPS to find nearby open houses.

Starting Wednesday, Trulia will offer CompareIt, a tool that lets users choose five properties for sale to directly compare with one another. Before now, Trulia just generated a list of comparable properties that sold or are for sale at the bottom of a listing.

I only used Trulia for a week, and I’m not a typical buyer since I was just looking — for now. But I got a lot out of the site, especially by browsing maps of neighborhoods that I know well (I’m picky about my preferred location) and asking questions of the Trulia community. Its iPhone app listed nearby open houses according to my search criteria and also worked on my iPod touch as long as I was in a Wi-Fi zone.

Another big plus to Trulia is Newsfeed, a list that shows up on the home page with content that’s automatically generated and personalized according to your past search locations. It is updated every day and spits out stats like the number of price reductions, open houses and new listings in an area. It shows an area’s average listing price, median sales price, number of foreclosures and average price per square foot, among other things. These data are a boon for people who don’t have the time or inclination to look this stuff up, and it aggregates the data into one intelligible, quick snapshot.

I found some flaws in Trulia, like the way it accidentally listed a property that was sold five months earlier. Trulia said it relies on partners for accurate listings, and those partners get their data from Multiple Listing Services or local brokers and agents, therefore Trulia’s data are only as good as its partners’. (At least one other real-estate site also accidentally listed the already-sold condo for sale.) Another problem occurred when I tried to use the CompareIt chart on Washington, D.C., properties; Trulia said the tool doesn’t work for D.C. due to a bug that it hopes to fix. Finally, properties saved on the iPhone app won’t transfer to your Trulia Web site account. The company says it hopes to fix the iPhone issue.

Trulia’s CompareIt lets users compare five properties with one another.

One of Trulia’s competitors is Zillow.com, which displays its own price estimates for all houses in the U.S. (for sale or not) to give people an idea of the real-estate value in an area. The two sites are similar in some ways: Both show heat maps, display data about nearby schools, have mortgage calculators and use online communities to answer questions. But Zillow doesn’t offer a stat-packed Newsfeed or an iPhone app like Trulia.

After browsing through Trulia, I found a variety of properties that suited my target price range and location preferences. One place had lots of big windows and a renovated kitchen, according to the photos and information listed on its detailed Trulia Web page. A shortcut on the page made it easy for me to share this place with three friends to see what they thought. I even posed a question to the Trulia community about the property: Does this unit have a private entrance, or does it share an entrance with the five other units in the building?

Ironically, this was the property that was already sold, as I found out when a real-estate agent responded to my question. It took him just 15 minutes (Trulia says this is within five minutes of the average response time) to post a response saying that he was familiar with the listing and that the place sold five months earlier. Trulia has since updated this property’s status.

Other questions that I asked of the community were answered within 20 minutes. In one instance, I asked a general question about the best time of year to buy in Washington, D.C., and three real-estate agents responded almost immediately; two were from my area and offered their advice — and their services — but one from Florida chimed in simply to offer some encouragement. Each responder was clearly identified with a name, classification (i.e. real-estate pro) and photo. Within a couple hours, four more people responded.

These questions and answers are shared with everyone on Trulia, and I clicked on a thumbs-up icon to vote for the answer I found most helpful.

Email alerts can be set up through Trulia so you’re notified if a property you like dips below a certain price, or if there are new blog posts about certain categories like financing, crime or environmentally friendly properties.

The CompareIt tool worked to see how properties (excluding those in D.C.) stacked up against one another, up to five at a time. These charts arm people with more statistics and (likely) more negotiating power.

The real-estate world can be intimidating, now more than ever. Though sites like Trulia won’t solve this problem completely, they could make the weighty decision of buying a house a little bit easier.

Edited By Walter S. Mossberg

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