Q&A with Craigslist's Craig Newmark

[mandy]

Five years from now, what do you see changing at Craigslist? Where else can you take this?

It's going to be more of the same, more cities, more languages. It's now in English and we've recently introduced Spanish, starting with Madrid. We're just starting. We have to improve technologies like multicity search. In some cases, we need to be able to search in nearby cities rather than doing multiple searches. We always need to improve customer service -- for example, we need better tools to detect and remove spam listings. One thing we found doing customer service is that there are not that many bad guys out there, that the people with good will far outnumber the bad guys. However, the bad guys make a lot more noise.

Is there anything you'd personally like to see happen with the site in the future? Will we ever see a massive redesign from the white, mostly text-based listings to something with more pizzazz and color?

We're pretty much not really changing. We do one thing well and we don't want to screw it up. And regarding our look and feel, someone said that our site has the visual appeal of a pipe wrench and that was intended and taken as a compliment. We don't need much new fancy stuff in general. We need tools that get the job done...

full article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/arti...ticleBasic&articleId=9053838