The Ravens just beat the Browns 16 – 0, but those of you without a Tivo may have noticed something else about the Monday Night Football telecast: a new Apple iPhone ad featuring Redfin’s very own iPhone app.  On seeing it, Redfin’s Scott Nagel, hardly one given to over-the-top displays of emotion, got high fives all around from his football-crazed children.

We knew the ad was coming, but Sasha put the fear of Apple in us and for once we kept a secret. To Conan Reidy and all the other people who say I can’t keep clam because of a few minor middle-school indiscretions, this is but one of many examples of really, really juicy stuff I’ve kept to myself…

Many thanks to the folks at Apple for hooking us up, and to Redfin’s iPhone team for building such a sweet app.

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Twitter has certainly been on everyone’s minds lately. The company’s traffic has declined recently, but its news coverage hasn’t. TechCrunch has written about Twitter 45 times in the last 15 days alone — including MG Siegler’s magisterial 2,500-word think-piece on Twitter’s re-tweet function .

Over the same fortnight, TechCrunch has written about only one other company so often — exactly as often in fact — and that is Google, with hundreds of products and $180 billion in market capitalization, which has in the past 15 days settled its dispute with book publishers, announced a $750M acquisition with federal anti-trust implications, and launched a major new rival to the iPhone.

By comparison, TechCrunch has only written 34 times about Facebook, often as an afterthought, in a post about Twitter.

But don’t blame TechCrunch; its Twitter articles get more traffic than posts about almost any other subject. And besides, while the distribution of overall media coverage is different from TechCrunch’s distribution, it isn’t that different. It’s the nature of news organizations to cover new companies more than old companies, and thank goodness for Redfin and all the other new companies in the world that this is so. It’s also undeniable that Twitter’s popularity among the media is in part driven by Twitter’s usefulness to the media, especially now that every journalist feels compelled to build her own personal brand.

But even if Twitter’s importance among journalists is natural and even good, entrepreneurs may not want to accord it the same importance.

It’s natural for us to focus on the bright shiny company, too. We certainly have here at Redfin, discussing all sorts of features to encourage Redfin users to share data via our site using Twitter. But we also survey our users two or three times a year, and here’s what we found last week when we asked 450 consumers what social networks they use: that they prefer Facebook by a margin of nearly 5 to 1.

So straight away, Redfin’s Lisa Taylor started working on sprucing up our local Facebook pages in Seattle, the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA, Orange County, San Diego, Chicago, Boston, DC and New York. Please join up!

And meanwhile, we wondered: could our users’ preference for Facebook be because our demographic is different? Well actually if any group of consumers could skew toward Twitter, it would be Redfin’s user-base, big-time: according to the same survey, our users are mostly male, about a third high-tech, and young but not too young (none of the teenagers who prefer Facebook are likely to be looking for a house). It’s hard to imagine a business with a meaningful cross-section of consumers that would have a different result.

So journalists and bloggers should keep talking about Twitter. But entrepreneurs shouldn’t always listen, at least not yet.

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Big news! We just announced a $10-million round of financing led by Greylock Partners’ James Slavet and his colleague David Thacker. Redfin’s group of existing investors — Madrona Venture Group, Vulcan Capital, DFJ, The Hillman Company — also pitched in on the round.

We couldn’t be happier about the team behind us. Like all the Greylock partners, James has deep operating experience, having run the gamut from founding a tiny Internet company to leading a multi-hundred-million-dollar business. And even though Greylock has every right to a bad-ass swagger, with probably more publicly traded companies under its belt than any other venture investor, the Greylock people you meet are somehow humble and funny and nerdy while still being terrifyingly impressive. Their first diligence request was a spreadsheet of in-depth Settlers of Catan statistics that we’d prepared for Greylock’s newest partner, the great Reid Hoffman.

We’re a good fit in ways beyond our affinity for Settlers. Time and again, Greylock has invested in cult businesses built with little or no marketing spending that have gone on to become household names — Facebook, Pandora, LinkedIn and, my favorite, ZipCar. Like our other investors, Greylock has the confidence to mentor the talented up-and-comers at Redfin into bigshots, to let Redfin grow as big as it can rather than selling at the first opportunity,  to think different and to think big. And it has high expectations, not just that we can continue to be a nice little business, but that we can become a company that doubles and doubles again.

Already, we’ve got plenty of momentum. Here are some of the past year’s highlights that we included in our funding pitch:

Revenue exceeded a $20 million yearly run-rate and Redfin generated its first profits

Redfin shipped the highest-rated iPhone application for real estate

Site visits increased more than 200%

Total dollar-value of Redfin transactions since inception exceeded $2 billion

Redfin customer satisfaction remained at 97%

Now the challenge is to keep performing, taking on new risks rather than just consolidating existing gains. For a while now, we’ve been too scared to take many risks. We’ve been profitable since June, but didn’t have much money in the bank, and,as we explained this morning to John Cook, couldn’t think far beyond the month right in front us.

We’ll keep running the business out of the cash register — we worked too hard to get to profits to abandon that discipline now — but the new capital gives us a margin for error when making a few big bets: beyond real estate search, we still have to put the whole touring, offer and escrow process online, and we’ve got to build the systems and processes that allow us to deliver the same amazing service to 10,000 or 100,000 customers every month, not just 100 or 1,000.

For now, we just wanted to thank all the folks who helped us put the round together: Paul Goodrich,  Steve Hall, Marc Singer, Emily Melton and Josh Stein on our board, as well as our excellent attorneys at Fenwick & West, Alan Smith and Matthew Forkner, and finally the folks at Redfin who crunched the numbers and made the pitch: Adam Wiener, Chris Roske, Sasha Aickin, Matt Goyer, Scott Nagel, Michael Young, Angela Cough, Bryan Selner and many others. Thanks to everyone for all your help, and to Greylock for leading the round.

We’re honored by your support, and we”ll work hard to make the most of the opportunity.

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Redfin.com’s performance and stability problems, which began with Thursday morning’s upgrade and continued until this evening, seem to be over.  All the photos and details of recently sold homes that became available with this upgrade had caused our database to fail under high user load . We resolved the problem by tuning the database and deploying additional databases, and now the website is once again fast and seems stable.

Redfin’s site is still sending out overdue listing alerts and tardily loading photos of listings but we hope that all those jobs run their course by Saturday morning. Until then, and probably for days to come, we will be carefully monitoring the whole Redfin system.

Next week, we may discuss here on this blog what went wrong and how we’re going to try to avoid the same problems in the future. For now, many thanks to all the engineers who worked ’round the clock since early Thursday to get us back online, and especially to the customers who patiently waited for that to happen. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

If you tried to check out the new Redfin yesterday without much success, please give it another shot now.

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This morning we did a massive update to our website increasing the amount of photos and data we store 340%.

Unfortunately, our website was offline from about 6:40 AM PST until 9 AM PST and then intermittently until 2:20 PM PST because of the increase in the amount of data coupled with the load from the excitement of a new release.

We are deeply sorry about the inconvenience this outage has caused for the visitors of our website and our customers. We are also sorry for not communicating more clearly about the status of the outage and how it was impacting you.

While the website is now back up we are still working to resolve the root causes of the issue. Once we know what all went wrong we’ll update you by posting here on the blog.

Update: Friday, 9:00 AM PST As a result of yesterday’s outage we aren’t retrieving photos for new listings. We hope to start pulling listing photos later today. We’ll update this post when we do.

Update: Friday, 12:00 PM PST You may have noticed that the site, a few times today, has been unresponsive. We’re aware of the brownouts and are actively monitoring the situation and trying as quick as we can to get back to situation normal.

Update: Friday, 8:51 PM PST Good news! The site should be back to its old self and is running on full power, fast and stable. By tomorrow morning, we should have photos for all the new listings.

Update: Monday, November 16th Our CTO, Mike, has posted about lessons learned, One Week After The Outage.

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Continuing in its goal to open the vault on as much real estate information as possible, Seattle-based Redfin today unveiled new features to its Web site which include automatic links to blog discussions as well as the addition of 9.6 million property photos and 1.4 million recent property sale listings.
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The upgrade added 9.6 million photos for 1.4 million recent property sales with an average of more than 100 data fields on the property’s features.
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Sasha Aickin chats with Meredith from Google mobile ads team about how Redfin uses their new Analytics program for the iPhone app.
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Redfin is posting closed-sale prices and photographs for all homes on the multiple listing service as soon as the listing broker marks the sale as final.
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Redfin: The Apple of our i(Phone)!: The Ravens just beat the Browns 16 – 0, but those of you without a Tivo may have noti... http://bit.ly/4fw9d4
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Redfin: Our iPhone app is in Apple's latest commercial! http://bit.ly/2pBVrn
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Redfin: It’s Facebook, Stupid (Not Twitter, by a Margin of 5 to 1): Twitter has certainly been on everyone’s minds late... http://bit.ly/1k6bLL
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Redfin: Heads up that our website may be unavailable from 1am to 4am PST as we upgrade our equipment to make the site go faster.
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Redfin: Greylock Leads a $10 Million Investment in Redfin: Big news! Redfin just announced a $10-million round of financing ... http://bit.ly/zzvQY
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