Like everyone  at Zillow, I spent our most recent Hack Week trying to test the limit of coolness.  I also gave myself a mission: to show the public, or at least the dev community, the power and potential Zillow data provides.

To access the Zillow data-trove, I used our public APIs. In four days, I built two projects:  one for cloud, and one for desktop. Both earned some laughs and applause at our Hack Week demo day.

The first project is called zTalkBot:  a chatbot backed by Zillow’s brain! It runs on Google App Engine. I’ve found that GAE is an excellent way to build up quick prototypes; it’s also one of the cloud platforms we build on for our production sites. To chat with it, add ztalkbot@appspot.com to your gtalk contacts now!

Here’s a demo:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/m_6GLn4H-D8[/youtube]

At Zillow, developers often experiment with and build on their favorite platforms. With my second project, I wanted to try out a completely new one for me. In order to show some love to desktop, zToolbox was born. zToolbox is an Outlook plugin to Zillow-ify email, as a cool productivity tool for real estate agents.  Please see the project in action below, or download the binary build form the end of this article.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/tnxXTEpvk54[/youtube]

How do I get started with the Zillow API?

First,  sign up a free account here: http://www.zillow.com/howto/api/APIOverview.htm. By signing up, you’ll get a ZWSID, which is passed in every API call. The API provides a read-only interface on four domain areas:  home valuation, property details, neighborhood data and live mortgage -related data. For details, see the Developer Guide from the link above.

Where do I find code samples?

If you want to have a working sample or checking out how the robot and plugin are built,  you can refer to the gitHub project here: zTalkbot and zToolbox (binary).
Please feel free to leave question on our gitHub page.