I live mostly in Vancouver now, and I’m finding that the usefulness of Craigslist really does vary proportionally with the size of the city you’re using it in. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful in smaller towns (not at all), it just means that as you get into bigger towns it gets more useful, and as you get into really big towns that relationship holds steady: Craigslist gets really useful.

I knew it was an odd website, but I didn’t realize quite how odd until I read this article:

Why Craigslist Is Such a Mess — Gary Wolf, Wired

I did not for instance know about the haiku. Or the full extent of how non-monetized it really is. And seriously, 30 employees?

The article also discusses how Craigslist routinely makes technical adjustments to shut down people who try to layer more modern services (product photo browsing or ajax navigation for instance) on the austere skeleton of the raw site. That I knew about. One modern-ish addition I’ve discovered is that you can (finally) make an RSS feed from a search pattern. For instance, I’ve got a feed going for

(receiver | reciever | amplifier) (yamaha | fisher | kenwood | marantz |onkyo | sansui | harman | pioneer | technics)

specific to the downtown Vancouver section, because I want me an old amp. I ran that search, saved the result to my bookmarks toolbar via the RSS feed at the bottom of the page, and every day (okay, hour, minute), I scan the feed dropdown to see what new items have shown up.

And here are a couple of mashups they haven’t killed off:

housingmaps.com — search for apartments by map, and see pop-up photos.

Craigslist Redesign — if you’re a Greasemonkey user, this will tweak the layout of the site to be a little cleaner. ASo will all of these. Actually, never mind.

There are a bunch of other greasemonkey scripts floating around out there to add extra functions to Craigslist (eg.), but I woulnd’t count on them still working.