Craigslist makes connections for buyers, browsers, lovelorn

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 02/06/2005 (7724 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

LOOKING for a ride to Toronto or a used bike for sale? Need a new apartment for September or backup singers for your band?

Then you might want to check out Craigslist.

This free online bulletin board burst onto the scene in the mid-’90s and has grown into a worldwide Internet phenomena.

It all began when San Francisco computer programmer Craig Newmark created a site where he and his friends kept track of cool parties going on around town.

Through word of mouth the site became hugely popular, and people throughout San Francisco began posting everything from apartments for rent to job openings on his site.

Word spread and soon people in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and other American centres wanted in. So Newmark set up pages for these cities and Craigslist grew into a collection of community pages all linked under the craigslist.org banner.

By 2003, there was a Craigslist in all the major American cities, as well as London and Toronto and it became the place to go when you wanted to buy or sell, promote your show, find an old boyfriend or the sweater you left on the bus.

And in January Winnipeg finally hopped on the Craigslist bandwagon and got its own page at winnipeg.craigslist.org.

Today, 120 cities in 25 countries are tapped into Craigslist and the site is used by about eight million people each month.

An Internet success story, in March 2003 Time magazine called Craigslist “the best one-stop-shopping place for everything from jobs and housing to yoga lessons and one-night stands.” A year later, the Los Angeles Times announced that it was “one of the hippest and most popular websites on the planet.”

There are a number of reasons why the site has such mass appeal.

But the biggest, no doubt, is that it’s free.

You don’t pay to post a message (although in San Francisco, New York City and Los Angeles businesses are charged below-market rates for help-wanted ads), and there are no registration or membership fees.

Secondly, the site is completely commercial-free.

Up and running only five months, the Winnipeg page doesn’t have anywhere near the number of posts as other longtime Craigslist cities, but already the odd and always eclectic array of requests that the site is known for is shaping up on the local page.

A guy named Gord, for example, is asking someone about to make the drive to Toronto from Winnipeg to haul out a few boxes of pots and pans that he left behind when he moved. A 27-year-old American student wants someone to help him “escape” to Canada.

If you happen to be in the market for an antique cream separator, you’re in luck — there’s one selling for $250. And if you want to go to September’s sold-out Pearl Jam concert, a pair of centre floor tickets is going for $235.

Need a term paper written fast? An Internet company is offering the low rate of $15 per page with free delivery.

On the “missed connections” page you can seek out old friends and lost loves. For example, someone is trying to find Annette who worked at the Round Table on Pembina Highway in 1993.

The “lost and found” section is intriguing. There’s nothing posted from Winnipeg as yet, but if you want to have your faith restored in humanity, check out the L.A. page, where someone actually posted that they found an iPod. If you correctly name the play lists, they will give it back to you.

The personals section is typically the most raunchy on Craigslist and sure enough, the Winnipeg page is no exception. There are guys seeking threesomes and out-of-town businessmen looking for a distraction when they visit Winnipeg in a few weeks.

If you have some time on your hands, there are numerous discussion forums where people all over the world rant and rave on just about any topic imaginable. There’s one particularly in-depth discussion on the pros and cons of fake nails for your feet.

And that is perhaps the biggest allure of Craigslist.

Even if you don’t have anything to hawk, it makes for always entertaining, and occasionally bizarre, reading.