Recognizable, fast-loading, but outdated as hell website seeks Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineer. Love it or hate it, Craigslist‘s design could provide a better experience, and apparently Craig thinks so too, as this weekend the site posted a job opening for someone to make it “faster, friendlier, and easier”. It’s hoping for a brave designer who can “develop new products and features that will have CL users swooning”, “optimize internal team tools”, and who has mobile app design and platform support skills.
There’s plenty of tweaks we’d appreciate like more consistent navigation controls and better use of whitespace. But don’t expect Craigslist to ditch its famously minimal facade that’s helped it climb to 50 million classified postings and 30 billion page views a month.
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Many years ago, after graduating college, I came home before moving to NYC, wondering how I would scrounge together the money for the first month’s rent and security deposit so my friends and I could all live together in the Big Apple. I had one month to get the cash, and instead of going out for traditional, hourly-wage work, I decided to go through all of my old stuff and throw it on eBay. In those days, I got online through dial-up, would have to mail a hard copy of the pictures to interested buyers, and would ship items to auction winners only when their check arrived by mail and cleared into my bank account. In one month, I got rid of winter jackets, sports equipment, and baseball cards to the tune of $7,000, tax free, enough to buffer the move to NYC.
A few years later, when I moved to San Francisco, it was Craigslist to the rescue, helping with initial sublets, furniture, stereo equipment, and the odd jobs I did to soften the transition. Without knowing it, I was stumbling through life fueled mainly by a peer-to-peer (P2P) network and economy that helped me connect supply and demand, as well as time and money. Instead of using consignment shops or hosting a garage sale, or instead of buying new items in a traditional store, I buffered my moves to NYC and SF primarily fueled by P2P networks.
That was P2P 1.0, anchored by eBay and Craigslist, networks that have connected billions. And, while these companies continue their march, we are already into the next peer-to-peer evolution: P2P 2.0. → Read More
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has just launched craigconnects, which he says is a long-term initiative to “connect and protect organizations that are doing good stuff”.
Newmark on the site’s homepage says craigconnects is “the biggest thing” of his life, and that he’s committing 20 years to the project, which will initially focus on non-profits and public service organizations that “get stuff done on a sustainable basis”. → Read More
You are the sword and shield of the party! In this case, the party is a California-based private investigator looking to bank a few dollars by fighting piracy. An ad recently popped up on Craigslist San Antonio looking for “piracy surveillance investigators.” Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak about town, seeking bars and other establishments that are illegally showing sporting events, like UFC or WWE or boxing. You stand to make up to $500 per night → Read More
Hour.ly, a New York City startup that matches temporary job seekers and freelancers with prospective gigs and employers online, unveiled two new features and partnerships on Tuesday with Trufina and Tinychat.
Co-founded by Brooke and Lynn Dixon (Left to right, in image below), Hour.ly has been in pre-revenue, beta mode since September 2010. The bootstrapped company’s newest site features should have it generating and sharing revenue in the second quarter of 2011.
Through its partnership with Trufina, Hour.ly will allow temporary job seekers to pay for and run their own identity and criminal background checks, so that employers won’t have to, and so that hiring decisions won’t be delayed. Hour.ly will also enable employers to conduct an in-browser video chat interview with job seekers — through its partnership with Tinychat — rather than requiring them to download and use a service like Skype or Jabber. → Read More
Apparently used by some (it looks like primarily vehicle enthusiasts mostly) more than Craigslist.com itself, aggregator and search engine Craiglook was shut down by Craigslist, in a move reminiscent of when the company blocked Oodle back in 2005. → Read More
Everyone is talking about Craigslist finally folding and taking down its adult services section. Earlier this month they took it down on the U.S. Craigslist sites without public comment, replacing it with a “censored” logo. A couple of days ago even that censored logo was removed. The debate is centered around prostitution. And in particular around sex slavery, sex crimes and underage prostitution. Nasty stuff, which is probably why Craigslist eventually surrendered. It’s hard to debate that kind of emotion with logic, even when the law is on your side.
And on Craigslist’s side the law is. The EFF rightly sees this as nothing but a freedom of speech issue, saying “Through this now years-long struggle, Craigslist’s legal position has been and remains absolutely, unequivocally correct…The federal statutory immunity upon which Craigslist relies is not some clever loophole. Rather…a conscious policy decision by Congress to protect individuals and companies who would otherwise be vulnerable targets to litigants who want to silence speech to which they object, illegal or not.”
But Craigslist folded anyway. And in the words of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, “You fuckin’ people. You have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today, Kaffee. That’s all you did. You put people’s lives in danger. Sweet dreams, son. ” → Read More
Bad news for Craigslist users who like to peruse the Erotic Services Adult Services section of their site. It’s gone, replaced by a large black and white “censored” logo.
I’ve reached out to Craigslist for comment and await their reply. But the choice of words is significant – the section wasn’t simply removed, the censored word was used.
The site has been embattled as old press and state attorneys general use any excuse to blame sex crimes on the site. From South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster’s failed crusade against them to a variety of press stories about sex and other crimes. If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story. → Read More
Craigslist, embattled over the most recent allegations of sex trafficking and underage prostitution, pointed their finger at eBay yesterday. Craigslist has put significant efforts into moderating inappropriate listings on their site, says CEO Jim Buckmaster. But eBay continues to accept the worst kind of ads, depicting “young Asian females engaged in unprotected sex” on its Spanish subsidiary Loquo. He points to a number of listings that showed graphic pictures of sexual acts, and also pointed out that eBay aggressively markets upsell opportunities to listers, effectively taking part in the transaction.
How did eBay respond? By blocking access to Loquo from IP addresses originating in the U.S. But the site, and the listings, are easily accessible – just copy the URLs into an IP anonymizer, for example. The extremely NSFW listings are still up and active.
A post on Aimgroup says eBay is also planning on eventually taking down these types of listings as part of its “process of ensuring all of its sites are in alignment with its family-friendly values.” → Read More
They say nothing is certain except death and taxes. And, maybe, you could be certain that no matter how many design fads come and go on the Internet, Craigslist would pretty much look the same as Craigslist has always looked. Designer types get downright pissy that the site’s design has stayed static. And makeover recommendations abound – Wired even dedicated several print pages to the idea last year.
“Craigslist is frustrating and claustrophobic,” said Matt Willey of Studio8 Design in that Wired article, who recommended pull down menus and lots of images. But Craigslist had trudged along, racking up 50 million unique visitors a month and 13.4 billion page views (Comscore, July 2010). Not bad for a site that has looked almost exactly the same for over a decade.
But parts of Craigslist are now sporting a somewhat updated design. → Read More
It looks like another Delicious key architect is migrating to the new location-based startup BlockChalk. The latest is Josh Whiting, who was formerly a lead engineer at Delicious for three and a half years (he was actually one of the first members of the team before they were acquired by Yahoo,. we’re told) before he left that role to become a senior engineer for Craigslist. Whiting joins former colleague, Stephen Hood, who was the product lead at Delicious before starting BlockChalk with Dave Baggeroer of Stanford’s Institute of Design.
Along with his title of co-founder, Whiting will be BlockChalk’s chief engineer. The location space continues to be red hot right now, and BlockChalk has a compelling, yet simple product. It’s a mobile app that lets you adds notes to the real world by pinning them to any location. Hood notes that in the past few weeks alone, they’ve doubled traffic and users, and are now available in 111 countries, 8217 cities, and nearly 13,000 neighborhoods all over the world. → Read More
We forgot to mention this, but if you want to buy Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show set make your way to Craigslist. Conan is asking for your best offer, or Coldplay tickets if you’re willing to trade. Boo, NBC! → Read More
With its 140 character limit, Twitter is all about brevity. But if you think the same shouldn’t apply for a job application, well then, “you’re done.”
This Craigslist job listing has some interesting rules, to say the least. While the eye-grabbing headline is asking for a “Twitter Genius” in Greenwich Village, the actual role is an “expert” social media marketer for some sort of e-commerce startup. “I need someone who tweets in their sleep and updates their fb status before calling their mom on Mother’s Day,” the description reads. And it gets better. → Read More
Two weeks ago we wrote about the story of developer Romy Maxwell, who had built a Craigslist mashup using Yahoo Pipes. A few weeks after sending his app to Craigslist founder Craig Newmark (who forwarded it to other members of the Craigslist team), the world’s largest classifieds site blocked Maxwell’s app. And then it blocked every other application built on Yahoo, much to the chagrin of many developers. Tonight, Craigslist has ended its ban of Yahoo Pipes, according to a tweet from Craigslist (and former Yahoo) employee Jeremy Zawodny.
While Craigslist was initially quiet about the ban (it didn’t warn developers at all), CEO Jim Buckmaster did write a blog post the next day explaining the site’s rationale: → Read More
Developers take note: if you’ve got a mashup built off of Craigslist’s data, don’t even think about showing it to anyone who works there. At least, that’s the lesson learned by developer Romy Maxwell, who says that Craigslist has blocked both his mashup and every single project built on Yahoo Pipes a few days after a friendly Email exchange he had with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark.
Maxwell is one of the developers behind a new mashup called Flippity, which lets you plot Craigslist listings on a map. In a blog post, Maxwell writes that he had been having an Email exchange with Newmark over the last few weeks, during which Maxwell asked if the techniques employed by his project would be acceptable under Craigslist’s restrictive Terms of Use.
Newmark replied that “as a rule of thumb, [it's] okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes.” Since the project used RSS feeds and was non-commercial, that seemed to indicate that the project would be OK. → Read More
Craigslist founder Craig Newmark will join the advisory board of Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia.
The Wikimedia Foundation advisory board was created in January 2007. The main job of advisory board members is to attend a once a year meeting at the annual Wikimania conference. They also contribute in their specific areas of expertise. I guess that means customer service for Newmark (his Craigslist title is Customer Service Rep), as well as patting Wikipedia on the back for also creating a massively massive website based at least party on sparsity of design (something he has direct experience doing himself).
Newmark has called Wikipedia “first draft of history.” Current advisory board members include: → Read More
Thomas Dart, the Illinois sheriff who took Craigslist to court over erotic advertisements that appeared on the popular classifieds site, is unhappy with this week’s decision of a federal judge to toss the lawsuit (full ruling embedded below).
In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dart (pictured) said he was disappointed with the verdict and is now considering an appeal. → Read More
OLX and hi5, both challengers to dominating juggernauts in their respective fields (online classifieds and social networking), have teamed up to expose each others’ admittedly vast but geographically spread audience to one another. OLX says it currently boasts 70 million unique visitors each month across 90 countries, largely thanks to existing partnerships with services that have historically seen most of their growth in Latin-America and Asia (Friendster, MySpace Lat-Am, Fotolog etc.), while hi5 claims 60 million monthly unique visitors from 200 countries.
Even with a reasonable amount of overlap accounted for, these are significant numbers, albeit in countries where potential advertising income is generally much lower than it is in the U.S. and Europe. OLX (a competitor to Craigslist in the United States) and hi5 (a competitor to the likes of Facebook and MySpace on a global level) claim the fresh partnership serves to consolidate both companies’ hold on the Latin American market, while making way for accelerated growth in the rest of the world. → Read More
Anyone see Funny People this weekend? One of the best movies I’ve seen this year, despite the 10 minute MySpace commercial in the middle of it.
The two main characters, Adam Sandler and Seth Rogen, visit MySpace for a $300,000 paid comedy gig. Among a variety of “f**ck Facebook, In the Face” jokes (said two or three times. really) was some really good material, including Rogen asking “I wonder if Tom and Craig from Craigslist would ever get in a fight….Who’s tougher? Tom has more friends…Craig has weirder friends though. Craig has friends that are willing to do a lot more for cash, I’ll say that.”
Sandler also says “They say the more friends you have on MySpace the less friends you have in real life.”
MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson was also on set and part of the movie, and has now officially been mixed up with another Tom Anderson on IMDB. Overall it was an amazing commercial for MySpace. The company says they did not pay for the placement. → Read More
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