I for one absolutely admire Craigslist’s non-branded, not-for-profit mentality. Regardless of its primitiveness, Craigslist serves its purpose exceptionally well. Apparently, not all companies need profits to keep them focused.
eBay can’t seem to provide a decent customer experience to save its life regardless of how much it charges for listings. Instead of improving their product, best strategy they can come up with is to buy a minority share in craigslist so that they can strongarm the company.
It is also very telling that people (especially the newspapers) think Craigslist has a duty to not undercut their outdated classifieds by not being free. You know they are really reaching for somebody to blame.
Can't they create an API and give developers metered access to their system? A thousand better websites will mushroom overnight with no loss in revenue for them. They can even require the third party site not accept signups or store any data.
In my experience, offering API access is a great way to massively increase developer workload. If they don't want more money, and they don't want to hire lots of new developers, what's the incentive for offering an API?
"Regardless of its primitiveness, Craigslist serves its purpose exceptionally well."
That's just not true. Finding things on craigslist has always been a painful experience for me. External tools (e.g. Padmapper) make things better in some categories, but the combination of craigslist's dominance and its stasis have been bad for consumers, regardless of their benevolent mindset.
I'm curious what makes your experience so painful. I've found using Craigslist to be quite painless while selling or buying (Chicago, Paris, and SF) - usability is ridiculously simple and straight forward.
IMHO, KISS is part of why Craigslist has been so successful.
Try keeping an eye out for certain models of older vehicles. I like old VW's but there is no way to easily say, "just show me Volkswagens made before 1980", it takes a query like.. (1948|1949|1950|1951|1952....|1979)
Now I have those bookmarked and saved, but for someone like my dad who also likes Volkswagens, he doesn't know thats possible so has to weed through hundreds of newer VW ads. Thus its painful.
eBay can’t seem to provide a decent customer experience to save its life regardless of how much it charges for listings. Instead of improving their product, best strategy they can come up with is to buy a minority share in craigslist so that they can strongarm the company.
It is also very telling that people (especially the newspapers) think Craigslist has a duty to not undercut their outdated classifieds by not being free. You know they are really reaching for somebody to blame.