Applications and PTA: Craig’s List
I decided to evaluate Craig’s List because I actually used the website for the first time this year. My suitemates and I were looking for some furniture, specifically a couch, and we ended up finding an estate sale near by through Craig’s List. I found the myself unimpressed by the majority of the posts, however, and though I eventually found what I was looking for I was not inspired to look at it again after the estate sale failed to result in us finding a couch (we did however, get a shelf and a few records, it was not a particularly unsuccessful trip). I found the layout, which is extremely primitive, both uninviting and uninteresting. The homepage was well organized, and I liked that all of the different cities are listed on the side (as apposed to having to go to a different page to change your location), but once I clicked on any of the categories the organization seemed to only consist of breaking the posts up by the day they were posted. Also, while I did eventually find what I was looking for, the categories were not broken down enough and the one-line titles of each post were not consistent enough if, so that I usually had to click on the post to find out if it was remotely what I was looking for. Also, in the back of my mind I kept thinking about Craig’s List murderers that I had read about in a couple of magazines. Luckily, the estate sale was legitimate.
Despite all of this, when I was told that Craig’s list was a good place to look for summer internship, I decided to give it a second shot. I was not expecting to find anything particularly promising, but then I realized I really did not have any other leads besides my parents and their friends. If I wanted to work anywhere outside of their field, I would have to do research so where, and I figured that it would be easier to find places that where looking for interns on a website where … people posted things that they were looking for. Still, with Craig’s List murderers in the back of my mind, I was a little nervous about sending my contact information out to strangers. Taking somewhat of a leap of faith, I looked through the posts from the last two days and found several positions that seemed promising. Though there were quite a few more that pertained to my general interests, I decided that air on the side of caution and not send my resume to the ones that asked for pictures, or seemed unprofessional (for example – asked for “real people – no Hollywood snotty types”). Even though I have used the site twice and found some useful information, I cannot say that I like it, or even find it that helpful. Craig’s List really has done the minimum, and for some reason, as far as I know, no one has made a more user-friendly version of the site. While newspapers still offer things like personal advertisements, Craig’s List has taken that format, copied it to make the homepage look like that section of the newspaper, and added links to each city so that the users at the very least, do not have to look at advertisements for places hundreds of miles away.
Facebook attempted to create something similar to Craig’s List with their “Marketplace” application, it never took off the same way that Craig’s List has. When Marketplace began in 2007, it was met by anger from hundreds of thousands of Facebook users who had the application forced into their bookmarks. Unlike Craig’s List, which asks for as little personal information as possible, and will even create a new email address specifically for your advertisement, each time you click on a Facebook application, you are allowing the makers of the application to gain access to any personal information you currently have on the website, and even information that you used to have on your Facebook page and later deleted. While Craig’s List anonymity might pave the way for the occasional murderer, the majority of the users just do not feel the need to sell their couch through a program that is going to sell the list of their favorite movies to advertisers if they can do the same thing without their 542 Facebook Friends knowing about it. I cannot remember the last time I saw a newsfeed update about someone posting something on Marketplace, but when it first started I would automatically get an update when someone I knew posted something for sale. Why Facebook thought that I would care, is really beyond me. If I had been looking for a new lamp, I would have looked for it myself somewhere like Craig’s List, but Marketplace attempted to get tap into impulsive buying by posting new products directly onto new feeds without waiting for people to search for things that they actually wanted.
Craig’s List is not just a list of things for sale; however, it includes six sections, plus one to post resumes and one to find your location, including a “discussion forum” section. When I had perused the site before, I assumed that the discussion forums were conversations between users about the topics listed under the heading. I just clicked on the link, however, and found that that is not exactly right. The left side of each of the categories under “discussion forum” is a list of links posted on after another, and the right side is used to search for either a keyword or a person’s handle or username. Beyond this, I am still pretty confused about what this section is used for. It appears to be some sort of discussion (which makes sense considering the section title), but I could not tell what people were replying to. Also, a lot of the posts seemed to be aimed at specific other users, and almost all of them were only a sentence long, and none seemed to be referring to the sentence posted directly above it from another user. What I learned from this is that I would not be returning to Craig’s List to use their chat room-like section, but clearly, there are hundreds of people who were able to understand it better than myself, and use them.
Before doing any research, I decided on my own that I would consider this technology successful, but since I had never posted any thing on the site myself, nor had I ever seen any advertisements (for things outside of the Craig’s List realm), I was not sure if it was financially successful, or even how many people actually use the site, so I clicked on “Craigslist Factsheet”. There I learned that the site has over twenty billion page viewers a month, fifty million users in the United States alone, and is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (spelled Portugese on the website), and Spanish, and is offered in seven hundred cities in seventy countries. As for the discussion forums, more than 120 million users have posted on the one hundred forums. In terms of finances, Craig’s List has been connected to eBay since 2004, when eBay bought twenty-five percent of the site. It has been a for-profit site since 1999, when a small percentage of the postings came with a fee (which I was unable to find). The site also has thirty employees; all based out of San Francisco, where it began in 1995 when a man named Craig Newmark started an email list of San Francisco events as a hobby.
Since it was a little difficult to find information about Craig’s List, from its own site, I decided to turn to Wikipedia. Apparently, since 2004, it has cost twenty-five dollars to post job openings in some major cities, but the “gigs” section (where people like myself look for internship) do not have a posting fee, and posting in “Adult services” cost ten dollars, and must be reviewed by a Craigslist employee. I also learned that the founder (Craig Newmark) was quoted as saying that the site works “because it gives people a voice, a sense of community trust and even intimacy…[as well as] down-to-earth values, customer service and simplicity.” I also learned from Wikipedia that the only time Craig’s List has ever had advertisements was on April Fools Day 2002, when the staff posted mock-banner ads. I was surprised that considering anyone can edit Wikipedia, there was nothing about Craig’s List murders, which took place just last year, but I guess it is possible that someone who works for Craig’s List could be editing their Wikipedia page to avoid murder being synonymous with Craig’s List.
In Free Culture, Lessig says “People post when they want to post, and people read when they want to read … technologies that enable asynchronous communication, such as email, increase the opportunity for communication (Lessig, 42).” Though he was referring to blogs, I think that this argument works for Craig’s List as well. In particular, it refers to the way that people use it when they want to – something that Facebook’s Marketplace application did not consider. This use of technology might just be online classified advertisements and forums, but they are, as the Craig’s list factsheet states, “community moderated”, with the small exception of the adult section. Craig’s list may not be as high-tech as many other Web 2.0 applications, but by sticking the basics they have attracted billions to their site. Also, by avoiding advertisements, they keep people happy with the basics that they are being offered because they feel that the site is not just making money off of them (like Facebook), and are willing to look through a few pages before finding what they are looking for, or even paying the small fee to post the few things that require them.
