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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#271

Post by melvinmt »

ssebro wrote: post #151
binaryorganic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.

If this is true, then he (Craig Newmark) really needs to read the innovator's dilemma ( http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B... ). TLDR: If you allow yourself to become a prisoner to your success, you're actually making your continued success unlikely. You can solve the dilemma by spinning out a smaller, irreverant version of yourself & giving them what they need to destroy the old company. In…

The author of this book probabaly didn't create a Craigslist, so how would he know?

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#272

Post by mappu »

intended wrote: post #265
wallflower wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway. Jared Spool has said that when you change the user interface - fairly dramatically - you frustrate your regular users because they are now unfamiliar with it and have to restart their learning/experience curve. "At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don…

"If it works, its good enough?" Honestly thinking about other sites, digg died because of content, reddit survives because of content; even if someone could improve the interface, its not really going to matter.

It's interesting to consider digg... the canonical reason for its death (CEO replaced within a week, 40% of staff laid off two months later) was Digg-v4, a graphical overhaul that also removed features.

Google is definitely content over interface (most of the time). Facebook... not so much - millions of people join protest petitions against every minor interface change - but the value of having all your friends together is still so much greater than the alternative of changing service, whereas reddit was a short step away for digg users.

4chan definitely remains popular because of content - canv.as, a similar project by the same owner, has nowhere near the traction despite being more demographically targeted for mass-market appeal.

I think the lesson is, if you have a close-enough competitor and a fickle userbase, one screwup is all it takes to push critical mass over the edge. If i ran a large website i would study the Digg-v4 case very carefully. Going back to Craigslist, i don't think they have to worry too much about losing their top spot just yet.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#274

Post by phear »

Once read about how its a bad idea to base the core of your business around someone else's platform. Once they(and their lawyers) decide to re-evaluate your relationship with them it can nearly destroy what you've built. Testament to this are the number of apps based on twitter that died when twitter decided to up their offering and cover what they were doing. How to do it well is Zynga's relationship with Facebook

The people at PadMapper are doing a good thing looking for other sources but like the author said Craiglist was/is an important source of pad listings.

All the best to them

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#275

Post by cocoflunchy »

alister wrote: post #111
mtrimpe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their magic recipe is that an amazing amount of non-technical people have figured out how to work with the site. The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament. They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement. It's almost surreal to look at their site ( http://marktplaat…

Despite the very basic UI, the Dutch version of Craigslist seems to be doing well based on the hundreds of apartment listings in, for example, Amsterdam: http://amsterdam.craigslist.org/apa/ But if I might inject an opposing data point, nobody seems to use the Brazilian version of Craigslist. Check out Sao Paulo: http://saopaulo.craigslist.org/apa/ Can you believe that there are just 5 apartment listings for a metrop…

Same here in France. It looks like the only ads on fr.craigslist.com are either posted by americans living in France (they're allin english) or spam. I have never heard of anyone buying/selling stuff on craigslist among my friends/relatives.

The (pretty recent) equivalent would be http://leboncoin.fr, I guess.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#276

Post by maked00 »

Let me guess your young and your pathetic education taught you very little, and your sheltered life made you think everything would be handed you on a silver platter.

Instead of whining, you either need to offer large sums of cash to CL, or some deal. CL does not owe you a living. Your crappy little app is just skimming the cream off the top of CL's infrastructure and you expect CL to give you a free ride? Not going to happen. You are simply lucky you got away with it as long as you did.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#277

Post by maked00 »

Just read the entire thread, got to be one of the most sock-puppet, straw-manned, astro-turfed, meat-puppeted mess of self serving wanna be entreprenuer whining ever.

CL is successful, get over it.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#279

Post by arcos »

AgentConundrum wrote: post #195
kenrikm wrote: post #11

Craigslist is in major need of disruption. Actually apartment finding in general sucks I can't think of a single goto place to look for apartments other then Craigslist and that just proves point #1!

> Craigslist is in major need of disruption. I rarely hear anyone mention Craigslist in Canada. We have Kijiji [1] but its UI isn't significantly different than that of Craigslist. The home page is essentially just another long list of categories, etc. Maybe there's something about that design that works exceptionally well for this type of site. [1] http://www.kijiji.ca

I find that this is the case for smaller urban centres, in my experience. For Toronto, I use a combo of Viewit, Craigslist and realtor.ca (evil UI).

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#280

Post by phaus »

jsdalton wrote: post #254
phaus wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck, but I doubt it will work. My first experience with craigslist was trying to figure out why they had the capability to block my wife's ad for a free dog that contained a mispelled word while the site's creator was busy trying to tell the government that there was nothing he could do about the many child prostitution ads that appeared on craigslist.

Craigslist does not allow you to sell or give away animals -- it likely had nothing to do with a misspelling.

The email that was sent to me said that it was because of a misspelled word.
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