by Moe Zilla

Created on: January 22, 2008   Last Updated: September 18, 2009

I met Craig Newmark in 2000, and he gave me a new understanding of the philosophy behind Craig's List. He's a soft-spoken man - friendly, but quiet - and in 1995 he started the site for all the right reasons: he wanted to help other people. Even today he's channeling the surprising profits from the site into a non-profit organization. The Craigslist Foundation is designed to help new community service organizations get started, and it's yet another way that Craig's site is trying to help bring people together.

Every one of my friends has a great story about Craigslist, and that's the secret of its success - everyone's using it! Now it's become so much more than a web site. It's a wonderful, irreplaceable resource that's become a part of our lives. There's a magic quality to the way it connects people together.

Craigslist began delivering on a simple promise - free online classified ads - and accidentally discovered a powerful niche. It soon won a reputation as the best site for online job and housing listings. (People looking for jobs discovered that there were plenty of jobs listed on Craigslist, while employers learned the site was attracting those job-seekers that they wanted to reach.) After 14 years, the site is both popular and famous, which makes it even more useful, both to people who want to advertise and people who want to read the ads!

And Craigslist offers each poster an anonymous temporary email address. This allows users to advertise anonymously (without worrying about their email address being attacked by spammers). Craigslist charges employers $75 for every help-wanted ad, which lets the site continue offering free listings for everything else, including housing, items for sale, services, and even personal ads.

There's also discussion forums, which signals the site's second big feature. Because it's established itself in the lives of many regular users, there's a loyal community of people who contribute and share. The site encourages this with regular listings for upcoming events and discussion boards covering many topics. And the "Best of Craigslist" section even showcases some of the funniest or most poignant online ads. There's now local versions of Craigslist for over 450 cities (in over 50 countries!) This points to its one potential flaw: the quality of the listings depends on how many people are using it in your particular region. Craiglist started in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1995, and each section in the Bay Area version of Craigslist is filled with hundreds of useful advertisements. But if Craigslist only came to your town recently, it may not be as popular or as widely used.

Unfortunately, because of the sprawling nature of the Craigslist empire, it's impossible for them to police each of the bulletin boards. Instead, the service relies on its users to "flag" inappropriate posts. In some sections, a link is still displayed to the post, but when a user tries to read it, they get a message saying it's been flagged by the users. Craigslist would be more useful if the "flagged" posts simply didn't appear in its listings at all.

But that's part of Craigslist's philosophy - of keeping users involved in their site. Craigslist uses an extremely simple interface - just white (or grey) backgrounds, with simple text advertisements. It's been criticized for its lack of polish, but I think it lends the site a comfortable feeling. It's like a low-tech village "common area", where everyone can gather to buy, sell, or socialize. In the end, the site's secret to success has been: us. I love Craigslist - and I'm not the only one!

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