Wired Looks Into Craigslist's Refusal to Innovate

Guest post by Charles C. Johnson

In the latest issue of Wired, Gary Wolf takes Craigslist to task for failing to iterate upon its 1999 website design. In an age of apps, why doesn't Craigslist make itself more user-friendly? Wired investigates. [Emphasis is mine.]

 Each of these sites, of course, is merely one of the many sections of craigslist, which dominates the market in facilitating face-to-face transactions, whether people are connecting to buy and sell, give something away, rent an apartment, or have some sex. With more than 47 million unique users every month in the US alone—nearly a fifth of the nation's adult population—it is the most important community site going and yet the most underdeveloped. Think of any Web feature that has become popular in the past 10 years: Chances are craigslist has considered it and rejected it. If you try to build a third-party application designed to make craigslist work better, the management will almost certainly throw up technical roadblocks to shut you down.

Most baffling about the article was just how lightly Craigslist is staffed, reflecting, no doubt, founder Craig Newmark’s fascination with creating online public goods.

Craigslist gets more traffic than either eBay or Amazon .com. eBay has more than 16,000 employees. Amazon has more than 20,000. Craigslist has 30. Craigslist may have little to teach us about how to make decisions, but that's not the aspect of democracy that concerns Newmark most. He cares about the details, about executing all the little obvious things we'd like government to do. "I'm not interested in politics, I'm interested in governance," he says. "Customer service is public service."

Craigslist, though, might be onto something in its refusal to innovate.

. . .  craigslist is old-fashioned in any number of ways. It relies on email and the telephone in an era of SMS and social networks. It sticks to traceless transactions in an industry that makes its living collecting data from every touch. And just as people who run technical companies are reaching an apex of confidence in their ability to invent new forms of community based on sharing everything, craigslist still treats social life as dangerously complex, deserving the most jaded caution. Corporate isolation, user anonymity, refusal of excessive profit, glacial adoption of new features: These all signal Newmark and Buckmaster's wariness about what humans, including themselves, might do if given the chance. There may be a peace sign on every page, but the implicit political philosophy of craigslist has a deeply conservative, even a tragic cast. Every day the choristers of the social web chirp their advice about openness and trust; craigslist follows none of it, and every day it grows.

Comments

[Dalton]

The second quote you pulled seems to be flawed, taking a look at Google trends data: http://trends.google.com/websites?q=craigslist.org%2C+amazon.com%2C+ebay.com&geo=all&date=all&sort=0, you will see that eBay and and Amazon both get more daily unique visitors than Craigslist. However, they are clearly more efficient on the unique user per employee scale.

However, the point that Craigslist is flourishing without the updates is very intriguing. It seems to fall in line with Ian Ayers' hypothesis in Super Crunchers (which I see is a recommended book here) that in the data driven world, the companies that vow against data mining can find their own niche.

[GregC]

Comparing CL to eBay and Amazon is not very enlightening. Except for eBay's small-scale CL clone, which is more a trial balloon than a business segment, they're totally different businesses. You can argue that CL is lightly staffed because they don't have the marketers/ad sales/biz dev people that they might otherwise have. But they will never have warehouse workers or product management people that an Amazon has to have.

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1275736895]

Recently I attempted to post several "jobs" on Craigslist. As a start up, I was offering commission as compensation. Within minutes I had been blocked from putting the ad up by two people, one in Kansas and one in San Francisco, both of whom evidently monitor the jobs that are posted keeping them within specific requirements. After several e-mail exchanges back and forth, I made their suggested changes and I reposted, only to be blocked yet again. By this time I began thinking that in this time of unprecedented change and the way, new jobs were not coming online, but rather more creative and innovative types of jobs were out there, I asked one of the guys if Craigslist would consider sponsoring a new category whose purpose would be to connect entrepreneurs with talent in need of work. The reply was that it had been suggested, but I could try again. I did write to Craigslist and proposed it. To my thinking, this wonderful service could be expanded in a very unique way as to connect entrepreneurs, ideas, angels, and people with expertise to create new ventures. I haven't checked back to see of they've made any changes, but neither has anyone answered my post. Seems there is another ingredient required: a willingness to change and expand. Kathy Kirk
http://www.appliedspirituality.com

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