51–60 of 132 posts
http://sydney.craigslist.com.au/apa/ http://manchester.craigslist.co.uk/apa/ http://auckland.craigslist.org/apa/ http://rome.it.craigslist.it/apa/
and it's interesting that:
http://paris.en.craigslist.org/apa/
seems to have ads all in English.
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The fact that they haven't done the things you describe doesn't change the fact that craigslist is a terrible product. It is clogged with spam. Clever types of spam, often ones that crowdsource their content by mining previously legit posts. Since there are no reputation mechanisms to speak of, it's far too easy to waste your time with stuff that's either spam or a scam. Meanwhile, data visualization has progressed d…
Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties. Where is a good place to look for apartments? Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier than CL usually are cluttered with a high ads to info ratio, inaccurate info and/or are slow to load/navigate...
> Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier...
None of these gripes are about appearance except inasmuch as appearance reflects functionality. craigslist is ugly, but that's not the problem. craigslist doesn't work well. I don't want it to look different. I want it to work differently.
A competing site could look much prettier than craigslist and still work no better.
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Wading through apartment listings, for example, is miserable, and there are almost no mechanisms in place to encourage that very basic information is communicated by people listing their properties. Where is a good place to look for apartments? Most "apartment search" sites that look prettier than CL usually are cluttered with a high ads to info ratio, inaccurate info and/or are slow to load/navigate...
padmapper.com gets info from craigslist and others. hotpads.com is also good.
Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist. Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way. It was perfect.
And that is how most of my interactions with Craigslist have gone off. However, there have been some more frustrating experiences. My friend getting his ad ghosted, when he was trying to post his mom's guest house for rent. And it costing them 3 months of rent because Craigslist didn't let on a peep that his ad was ghosted. And there really isn't any clue on how to find help, I got lucky and found the forums via a Go…
CL is a great site that does exactly what people expect of it. You post classified ads in your local market and people get in touch with you. It is a web based classified ad and it works. When I want to buy something used locally and am not in a hurry I look through CL. Right now there is no other site organized to do this that works and is available in every market. Why should there be? CL works fine.
Because it's free it killed off newspaper classifieds but so what. Their bitter and angry competitors have to resort to dirty tricks like trying to get the police and FBI to investigate CL, which shows how desperate and out of ideas the competition is.
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padmapper.com gets info from craigslist and others. hotpads.com is also good.
Also craiggers.com
>"I don't think Craig's a bad guy, but he's harvesting $50M a year into his pockets and not improving the site" Not sure about the definition of "improving the site" here. I'm thankful to CL for not building gratuitous UI, or half assed "social" element, or "tweet this post to your social graph". Instead they work on improving the content by fighting certain types of abuse, having the founder do customer support and…
I don't fault them for spam. It's a very, very difficult problem, and since I don't have a magical solution to propose, I'm not going to complain.
But there are a few areas where CL could have made major improvements at a reasonable cost, especially considering their revenue. They could have at least experimented with some of these ideas, and tossed them out later if they turned out to be bad. Here are some of the main opportunities I think CL has missed:
-Richer data, tailored to each category. CL started down this road, e.g. by adding the rent field. But there's so much more they could do in every category.
-Better searching. With the huge volume of posts to sort through--and the large number of duplicate posts--the basic search features currently implemented fall flat. Improvements in this area would probably have to tie in with the richer data set mentioned above.
-Abandon the serial model, where the database is just a chronological list of posts. This model creates an arms race to be the person who posts the most frequently without getting flagged. In other words, it incentivizes the fine art of sneaking what amounts to spam just below the radar.
The core problem, as I see it, is that CL still views their service as an extension of its original incarnation: a mailing list. In the CL model, a listing is just arbitrary text and maybe some metadata if you're lucky, and the listings simply appear in reverse chronological order. Sounds like a mailing list archive to me.
Sure, that's how CL got started, but why not grow into something better? There's clearly enough usage and revenue to justify a realignment. Rather than "sticking with what works," I think this is a case of inertia.
Is there anything better than CL for apartments in the SF area? RentHop (in the graphic in the article) looks like it's NYC only. I'm looking at a move to San Mateo this summer and every "apartment finder" website I've tried has been a pitiful experience.
Take a look at padmapper - it's craigslist apartments data with filtering and on a map.
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Craigslist is so full of spam and reposts it's practically useless for major categories. Take for example Dallas apartments/rentals... hardly a single legitimate posting in there. There is A LOT more to complain about than appearance.
In my experience, the quality level of ads has dropped considerably. My last two Craigslist experiences: I recently tried looking for a used car in the Chicago area. It turns out almost all the postings in the "by owner only" area are actually dealers in disguise. I found this out the hard way after driving an hour to see a car at what turned out to be some kind of sketchball dealership. Another time, someone posted…
before driving you should have run the search for their number. Serial postings for various cars is definitely not FSBO.
Craigslist is the most UNBROKEN site on the web. It works flawlessly. Just yesterday I bought a cell phone from a local guy on Craigslist. Scrolled down the page. Found the phone I wanted in the city I wanted for the price I wanted. Called him, met at a restaurant, paid for the phone, and we went on our way. It was perfect.
"if I'm looking to rent an apartment, it would be nice not to see the same listing reposted every day, and having to re-read it and figure out if I've called them before. It might be even nicer to view them on a map, or god forbid have new and relevant listing emailed to me."
Is that not broken? Sure sounds it to me.
I had my first experience of using AirBNB today. From start to finish it was an absolute pleasure; a real example of using some of theis "web 2.0" tech to provide a better experience to the user, and ultimately connect buyer to seller more efficiently. Excellent search experience, great integration with maps, ajax where it made sense, crowd sourcing was useful (feedback).
I don't know too much about the space but by the popularity of airbnb it certainly seems like it is disrupting at least one part of the space craigslist has historically occupied.