Craigslist, famous for it’s spare design framework and egalitarian classifieds network, has been growing practically non-stop since it’s founding by Craig Newmark in 1995. The inherent nature of Craigslist is as a resource for local information, organized as it is into clusters of information listed in hundreds of cities throughout the US and the world.
An article in the New York Times, "The Nitpicking Nation" by Stephanie Rosenbloom discusses the rapid development of Craigslist
for the housing market. If you’re looking for a rental – one of the most fundamentally and exclusively "local" verticals, it seems that Craigslist is becoming the place to go.
What Craigslist offers, as Greg Sterling notes, is a well-developed character – their brand.
Craigslist doesn’t have any fancy features. No Flash, No AJAX, no neat Web 2.0 social networking buzzwords. But it does have personality.
Ultimately, in any internet marketing enterprise the biggest challenge is creating a service which not only attracts peoples attention but keeps their interest. Flickr’s done it. So have Technorati and Digg. But these are big projects with very wide scope. All of these ideas are broad. If you’ve got a small, focused site – topically oriented on, say, real estate, you’re not looking to gather as broad an audience as these other sites.
Or are you?
After all, everybody needs housing. If you can build a real estate service with a comfortable personality and the necessary functionality (you can’t leave this out!) then you really can target everybody. The key is not to try and target everybody all at once.
Craigslist enables their visitors to easily pare down their options to their own locality. No longer being bothered by extraneous advertising (everything’s local!) or irrelevant options (like having to reselect your state for each query) means they’re easy to use. That familiar feeling, like a small community bulletin board,
keeps people coming back.
I think that Zillow is doing a nice job developing a resource for home buyers, although they don’t offer home listings. I’m still waiting, though, for a great resource for rental listings. There are a lot of decent local sites, but your options become very limited if you’re in a city without one.
If anybody does happen to know a great rental listings site with national scope, I’d love to hear about it, though!
Just a few days ago, I wrote about this great idea of combining Google Local with Google Transit. I still think it’s a great idea – and apparently, Google has already been thinking about it. Yesterday, Bill Slawski posted a patent on customizing travel directions, which talked about an idea of being able to produce multiple sets of travel instructions through the Google interface.
In itself, this isn’t exactly related – but he also referred back to an earlier patent, Visually-oriented driving directions in digital mapping system, which included a discussion of a related advertising scheme where businesses may "bid or otherwise pay to be included as a waypoint." Fundamentally, this is what I was discussing. It’s not quite as, well, free as what I had in mind – but it would serve the purpose.
Unfortunately, if the system comes forward as a purely advertising supported service, it’ll inevitably be incomplete. It may depend on cost – if priced the same way as the yellow pages, most business may well jump on that bandwagon very quickly. There will always be those small businesses which I’d love to support if I could only find out about them, however.
One of the more interesting programs in development at Google, to me, is their Transit Trip Planner. Using essentially the same interface as Google Local, the planner is so far only available in Portland, Oregon, although there are discussions about an expansion to Toronto. This program has barely any relevance to search, right now – but I can foresee possibilities for some handy integration with Google Local.
One question that frequently occurs for me, as a regular user of public transit, is whether I’d be able to get X or Y on my trip – it would be very handy to be able to find out in advance whether there was a flower shop along the route, or a grocery store, or a place I could pick up a bottle of wine. I’d love to be able to incorporate this kind of search into Google Transit.
It seems a fairly straightforward incorporation between the two systems, and in fact Google Local does include a feature similar to this – the "service near location" search. The advantage to a local search with transit data would be that you wouldn’t need to know a particular location or address to find information near – just a route. Perhaps there’s no grocery store near either your destination OR your departure point – but if you take the 35A you’ll pass just a block away from one, for example.
Perhaps I’m dreaming; but to ME this would be a great service. Although Americans tend to be biased heavily towards private transportation, I can’t help but wish for a change. Anybody else think this would be useful?