Today I downloaded and installed a new free desktop program called Craigslist Reader by Motion Technologies in Indiana. If you spend a fair amount of time on Craigslist, this program will make you 3x more productive. The main feature is the ability to combine listings from a bunch of different categories and locations. You can also run queries on the whole combination of listings.
Say you are looking for jobs in government or education, in Washington D.C. or New York City. On craigslist.com, you’d have to browse through four pages of listings: Washington’s (1) Government and (2) Education page and New York’s (3) Government and (4) Education page.With Craigslist Reader, youjust check the boxes next to Government and Education under jobs, Washington and New York under location, and then click Search. Wala. Craigslist Reader returns the combined results from the four locations. You can also add a query to your search, for instance “policy” if you were looking for something policy oriented. Checkboxes to limit your search to “part-time” or “internship” listings are available to, just as they are on craigslist.com.
Browsing through postings with Craigslist Reader is very fast. In the top frame, you have a list of all your results. Click on a result and it appears in the bottom frame–exactly as the page would appear on Craigslist. Then you can simply click the next listing in the top frame, and that will appear below. With Craiglist Reader you don’t need to constantly click the back button to view the next listing.It mightbe worth downloading for this reason alone.
Craigslist Reader also lets your sort by things like title name and price. This is handy if you are looking through items in the “For Sale” or “Apartment” categories.
There are a few opportunities for improvement. The main place for improvement is speed. If you search multiple categories, it takes 30 seconds or more to return results. This is not quite Google search speed yet. You can immediately read the results as they come in, however, so the wait isn’t all bad. Also, you need to manually update the locations and categories from time to time, as craigslist.com changes occasionally. This takes up to a minute or more. It would also be nice if you could flag or email postings that you wanted to save. Currently, as you browse your results there’s no way to note your favorite results, although you can delete results that don’t interest you. Finally, the program froze on me my first time using it. It may just be my computer(Windows XP), but it hasn’t happened again, and hopefully it won’t
I love how craigslist.com hasn’t changed much from its simple design. I hope it stays that way. I think the way to bring the functionality of Web 2.0 to craiglist is through external applications like these. That way craigslist.com will always remain simple to use, which has proven a formula for success over time and I think is important for it to appeal to a mass audience. But for the Craigslist Power User, now there’s a great toolcalled Craigslist Reader that is a must have.
Craiglist Reader is for Windows only as of now. It is free as of now. There is a banner ad in the top right, but at least there’s no annoying spyware or other program bundled with the app. I am not aware of any Web only apps that have the same functionality. Motion Technologies is a web design shop in Indiana. I think they’ve got a very bright future, because I can see how tens of thousands, if not more, would want this.
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