With more and more people searching for great deals, many consumers have turned to online classifieds sites, such as Oodle or Craigslist. This rise of popularity has not gone unnoticed by con artists, otherwise known as scammers.
As the freshly-minted product manager for trust and safety initiatives at Oodle, my job is to make sure our [...]

From a platform perspective, Oodle has a lot in common with Twitter…
1. We index a real-time a stream of perishable, unique “tweets” (800-900k new messages a day) in the form of classifieds listings. Actually, we do more than just index these listings.  Our real-time infrastructure tags, enhances and prunes the messages flowing through our system.  [...]

We recently heard that Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo! for Craigslist. We’re hoping that with Jeremy’s influence, Craigslist decides to become more open. Historically, the company has not only blocked search engines (like Oodle), but has also tightly restricted user activity. It will be interesting to see if Craigslist’s stance on openness changes in the [...]

We are sorry to hear that Microsoft is pulling their classifieds product, Live Expo. Expo tried some really cool things with their product, and Oodle firmly believes in the need for continued innovation in online classifieds.

Henry Blodget estimated yesterday that Craigslist could be worth as much as $5 billion. While the number could be accurate, Craigslist’s plans for monetization, which involves charging more people to post their ads, is quickly becoming a thing of the past.
JohnnyC’s comment on Blodget’s story proved to be spot-on: “Free is the future of online [...]

Greg Sterling wrote a great post (“What Are Classifieds Today?”) after an interview with Craig (our CEO) about how the word “classifieds” doesn’t really mean much to anyone. He used the example of Craigslist and Google — to their users, Craigslist isn’t a classifieds site and Google isn’t a search engine. They are “places” to [...]