That’s why we’re so excited to launch a new feature we call Friendly Advice.  It allows you to invite your Facebook friends to weigh in on who you should select for the job you need done.  Your friends can vote and comment on the choices Redbeacon brings you –or— they can recommend different service professionals they’ve used in the past.  If a friend recommends someone new, we’ll automatically contact them and invite them to submit a price quote for your job.  Want to see this in action?  Take a look at this screencast.

We’re committed to bringing you all the information you need to find the best service professional for your job.  Of course this includes the price to do the job and available appointment times, but it also includes ratings and reviews, professional memberships, and the opinions of people you trust.  So the next time you request a service on Redbeacon, don’t forget to press the blue Facebook Connect button and  see who your friends think you should go with!

That’s why we’re now showing membership information for dozens of organizations.  We use membership rosters from  from industry groups ranging from Locksmiths to Painters, and we’ll display them in the Memberships section of service professionals who offer  price quotes for your service needs.  We hope this is just one more piece of data you can use to make the best decision on who to book through Redbeacon.

We love our users.  That’s a given.  But we thought it might be fun to go out and hear from some recent customers what they thought of us.  The fun thing about working on this project was hearing why people are using Redbeacon and how useful it has become in their lives.

What’s the most common thing we heard?  It seems like a toss up between saving money, convenience of scheduling appointments online, and finding the right person for the job.  Take a look for yourself to see what they had to say.

What do you think the most valuable thing about Redbeacon is?  Leave a comment and let us know!

(special thanks to Anthony Galdes for helping us with this project in his spare cycles!)

But we realize now we weren’t giving some of you enough time to make your selection.  You told us you needed more than 24 hours to review price quotes and make your selection.  You told us it could be frustrating when you were ready to choose a service provider but their price quotes had expired.

So now quotes you receive on a job won’t expire until a month after the auction ends, but the appointment times will expire after just 24 hours.  If you accept a quote more than a day after the auction ends, we’ll simply give you the service provider’s phone number and email address so you can contact them directly to schedule an appointment time. To paraphrase the immortal words of Yogi Berra, “Your auction ain’t over till it’s over!”

What we didn’t anticipate was that consumers would also have questions they’d want to ask service providers before selecting them to do their job. We began to hear from our users that communicating with the service provider before selecting them was important to them. Why? They might want to clarify what the price quote included, suggest a new job start time, or just learn more about the service provider’s qualifications and experience as it pertained to their particular need.

To address this problem, we’re excited to launch a new Private Conversations feature on Redbeacon.  When a service provider quotes a price for a job, the consumer can click on “Ask Question about Quote” to initiate a conversation with the service provider. The conversation feature is not a live chat (since service providers are out working – not hanging out on Redbeacon!). It’s more like an internal email system – you send the service provider a message and they respond as soon as they see it.  Try it out the next time you request a service on Redbeacon.  We’d love to hear your feedback!

But we quickly ran into another problem: Customers have told us they’re generally happy with the number of quotes they receive but they want  more information to help them decide which service provider to select.

We’ll be making several improvements over the coming weeks to help you choose which service provider to select for your job.  We just launched the first of these.

We now show community ratings a business or professional  has earned from leading opinion websites such as Yelp, Google and Yahoo.  The ratings will automatically be displayed on a service provider’s profile.  Of course, this is in addition to our own ratings, which we ask every consumer to leave after a job is completed.  We hope this gets us one step closer to our mission of getting you the best service provider for your local service needs!

Let’s say your roof was leaking and you needed a roof repairer, or you were locked out of your house and needed a locksmith, or worst of all… your in-laws just informed you they were coming over unannounced and you really needed a thorough house cleaning, stat!!

Wouldn’t it be great if we could put up a bat signal up in the air, just like the City of Gotham would when they needed Batman’s help?  Then a heroic service provider would come running over to take care of whatever problem we had.  This is where the name Redbeacon originally came from.  We wanted you to be able to activate your own ‘Red Beacon’ so that service providers far and near could come running over to take care of your problem.

We retained this feature (you can activate it by requesting a service and clicking on “Within the hour – it’s urgent!”), and we were super excited to see our first real Red Beacon requests come in last week.  Both jobs, one for a locksmith to open a door and one for a delivery truck driver to transport a large mirror, received quotes and were scheduled within minutes.

This is a real milestone for us.  It means we’re beginning to have enough active service providers in our community that we can find qualified professionals for your job whether it is 10 days away or 10 minutes away.

Do you have an (urgent) problem you need taken care of?  Just activate the beacon.

The Redbeacon team was honored with the 2009 Emerging Technology Award for Search from the San Jose/Silicon Valley Business Journal last week.  The recognition from the Biz Journal, along with winning TechCrunch50 this year, is really fantastic and (very importantly) helps spread the word about Redbeacon.

We care a tremendous amount about building an innovative and useful product, and ensuring that our consumer and service provider customers have great experiences on our site.  These awards show that people are beginning to take notice of what we’re trying to do.  We know it’s still early days at Redbeacon, but trust us, we have a lot more in store for you.  We’re looking forward to earning these early accolades!

We haven’t abandoned the other job start time options (At a specific date and time; Within the hour for urgent jobs).  It’s just that when it comes to choosing when you want your job to start, we wanted to be a little more…. well, flexible.

We’re happy to report that in the past several weeks, we’ve signed up hundreds of new Bay Area service providers from Auto Detailers to Personal Trainers to Videographers (sorry, I wanted to end with  something that started with “Z” but we’ve had a hard time finding any decent Zookeepers!).