Going after Craigslist by knocking down the walls

Another gun is being aimed at knocking down Craigslist, this time by an entrepreneur who sees the weak spot as Craigslist’s walled-garden approach to classifieds.

San Francisco-based iList.com just recently popped out from under the radar, and founder Chris Abad thinks that the key to creating a competing network of free classifieds websites that actually has a chance against the Craigslist juggernaut is to break down the walls. So an important component of the start-up’s strategy is to use iList to push ads out to social networks that people who place classified ads use.

What iList is doing is “the complete opposite of the walled garden” as represented by Craigslist (and many newspaper classifieds websites), says Abad.

His company has created a stand-alone classifieds site where anyone can place a free ad. But the service also allows you to push your ad out to people who are your friends or who follow you on these social networks:

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Pownce
• Friendfeed

iList also lets you post the ad you create directly to Craigslist. (However, an ad I created was immediately flagged for removal on Craigslist, so I’m not sure if Craig & Co. are necessarily supportive of external sites posting to Craigslist sites yet. Abad says he is aware of the problems, which often are the result of zealous Craigslist users flagging ads they perceive as violating Craigslist’s rules, but he expects Craigslist to soon accept legitimate ads even when placed via other services such as iList.)

Abad’s mission is no less than “to reinvent classifieds,” he says — a mission very much in line with our thinking here at ReinventingClassifieds.com, of course. And he sees the future of classified advertising as very much open. Pushing ads out to social network friends lists and followers is the start.

Can iList really compete against Craigslist, with its legions of devoted users and fans? Abad thinks that Craigslist is ripe to be displaced because it has failed to innovate. While many people love the Craigslist brand and the ethos it represents, he believes that what most people will flock to are the services that work best for them and provide the best utility.

A weakness in the Craigslist model, Abad believes, is that it allows anonymity by sellers. iList is focused more on identity, so that a potential buyer can learn a bit about the seller, for example by exploring the seller’s social network presences and perhaps getting a sense of his or her trustworthiness.

Another Craigslist weakness: Searching can be difficult because the ads are unstructured. Abad favors the approach of collecting data for ads in very structured ways, such as having the advertiser place the number of bedrooms and bathrooms in a house for rent in specific fields rather than in an unstructured body text field. Ergo, search utility goes up.

The beyond-the-walled-garden concept that iList is championing represents the future, I believe. Advertisers want their messages spread around and not kept to just one website. And people within your personal social networks are a great target audience when you have something you wish to sell. (However, geographic filtering would be nice, since my Facebook friends who live outside Colorado couldn’t care less about the bicycle I have for sale, for example.)

iList also has an open classifieds platform for developers to build their own web applications around iList data. The company hopes to do business with other companies, and any developer can build web applications around iList data, says Abad, adding that “data portability is one of our core values.”

Tags: iList, social networks