Insider Chatter by Donna Bogatin

Who owns local online? Local.com undoubedtly believes it has some proprietary rights, announcing U.S. Patent # 7,231,405 for location-based search today.

Is anyone taking ownership of classifieds online, itself an inherently local application, and social, according to two key online classifieds players: Craigslist and Oodle.

In my recent conversations with Craig Newmark of namesake Craigslist and Craig Donato, founder & CEO of Oodle, both entrepreneurs stressed the ability of online classifieds marketplaces to emulate offline social interactions encouraged by the real world trade of goods and services between individuals at the local level.

NEWMARK: Craigslist strives for creating a “culture of trust” at Craigslist, the “online flea market.” A neighborhood flea market is as much about socializing as it is about commerce and Craigslist moves the commerce as social experience to the Web.

DONATO: Oodle “connects” users that want to “hunt for great deals,” via interactive, social tools such as “instant alerts” and an entertainment calendar.

In striving to make the classifieds shopping experience more “personal and immediate,” Oodle aims to become the go-to online classifieds destination. Oodle says it aggregates 20 million listings monthly, from 75,000 classifieds partners, with the notable exception of Craigslist.

Craigslist itself directly gets 20 million classifieds ad postings monthly, according to Craigslist.

NEWMARK: “What connects people on Craigslist is the expectation of real human interaction.” The experience is not just like real life, but it aims to be a personal, genuine and authentic experience, mediated through technology.

Why does Craigslist believe its “authentic” classifieds community is best served by restricting classifieds aggregators, such as Oodle, and classifieds mashup players, such as Listpic, from accessing Craigslist classifieds ads postings? I asked Craigslist President & CEO Jim Buckmaster just that. Below is our Q & A.

DB: Craigslist is exploring ideas for making Craigslist even more social. The Web 2.0 movement believes “social” requires Web sites have open doors to third party Websites, such as Facebook seeks to do with F8. In the eyes of many in the Web 2.0 community, not allowing third party Websites to access Craigslist data for aggregating at vertical search engines or for creating mashups for unique ways to view the lisitngs (ie. Oodle, Listpic) means Craigslist is a “walled garden.” What is your response to such a Web 2.0 argument against a proprietary, closed Craigslist?

BUCKMASTER: “Walled garden” is a misnomer — this term arose to describe AOL’s attempts to keep their subscribers from accessing the internet at large — we do nothing of the sort, and in fact encourage users to go elsewhere

Likewise, I have never before heard the term “proprietary” applied to craigslist, given our well-known near-exclusive reliance on free software.

Although we’re actually more of a Web 0.0 company at heart (non-commercial focus on serving the user), Tim O’Reilly, the ultimate authority on all things Web 2.0, has on quite a few occasions assured us that we are very Web 2.0, which helps us sleep at night.

We direct our efforts based entirely on input from our users, leaving little energy for worrying about how we fit in with various marketing and business development buzzwords and catchphrases.

DB: What is the Craigslist community’s reaction to efforts of third-party Websites to aggregate and/or manipulate the classifieds ads they post?

BUCKMASTER: We have received vanishingly few requests from craigslist users that we open the site to companies that want to capitalize on the craigslist community–in fact it’s been quite the contrary, we generally receive complaints from users when sites create derivative services based on craigslist, particularly commercial ones.

DB: How does Craigslist prevent third-party Websites from accessing Craigslist listings without authorization?

BUCKMASTER: Thousands of entities, large and small, attempt to spider/harvest/auto-post or otherwise robotically interact with our site each month, competing with our users for server cycles, and otherwise compromising the site–preventing such actiivty is one of the many things keeping our highly talented tech team busy these days.

DB: What is the Craigslist infrastructrue comprised of?

BUCKMASTER: Craigslist uses a 3 tier architecture:Cache->Web->Database and deploys approximately 200 Intel-based servers built to our specs with a LAMP (linux, apache, mysql, perl) framework. Mod_perl , mod_gzip; 175,000 page views per kilowatt-hour.

DB: Does Craigslist allow search engines, such as Google, to access Craigslist data? Does Google show Craigslist ads posted by the Craigslist community in their SERPs?

BUCKMASTER: We have for many years allowed search engines such as Google to index much of the site (as long as their indexing software is well behaved). Although individual listings do appear in SERPs, most results point at our top level index pages, which our users (and the general public) seem to appreciate.

DB: How many pageviews does Craigslist process monthly?

BUCKMASTER: Approximately 7.5 billion.

Thanks to Jim Buckmaster, Craig Newmark and Craig Donato!

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CONTACT DONNA BOGATIN