Old wine in new bottles seems to be the constant theme of the computer business. We are always redefining old ideas with new monikers and names as if something drastic has changed. It's a sucker's game.

For example, the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is essentially a rewording of things that were going on in 1998, an era now called Web 1.0. I'm reminded of this only because I attended a social networking meetup (also called a meeting or gathering) and realized that all the buzz over social networking is really nothing new. You can read book after book about the social networking revolution and soon realize that these books are not much different than generalized "how to do marketing" books that floated around in the 1960s. The rules, the philosophies, the ideas are all old but re-jiggered to fit into the social networking meme.

This is the way the computer scene operates. Everything is gussied up to look hip and new when it's really putting lipstick on a pig. When all is said and done, the computer is good for a limited number of uses. These include calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing. That's it. Everything is a subset of those Big Five.

But when you boil computing down to five basic mechanisms, you have to constantly jazz up the categories with new terms. Word processing evolves into desktop publishing or blogging or content management, for example. It's all variations on the theme.

In the early days I would generalize about these same Big Five using early terminology. Back then, before it was actually boiled down, only "word processing" remained as a constant insofar as a naming convention is concerned. "Entertainment" was always referred to as "gaming." "Information retrieval" was "database management." "Calculations" were always "spreadsheets." There was no image manipulation in any serious way until the invention of Photoshop, and that was the last brick in the wall.

So if we are going to really boil down computers and try and project the future, it turns out to be rather simple. They get faster and faster and faster but not really any more useful (except for the fact that they are faster). This basic idea has been lost in the "there's an app for that" world of confused Web 2.0 jargon and the Intel Atom chip. The industry as a whole is losing its way. Each new development fails to increase performance Performance is the only thing important to the basic computer. All improvements such as newer and slicker versions of Photoshop, for example, require higher and higher performance machines. This holds true for networks and everything else. As performance increases things become more practical and easier to use. So where is the performance?

Part of the problem stems from the emergence of cheapskate computing. Getting the cheapest machine you can find that will manage to do the job--meaning it will boot an OS and actually run some sluggish apps.

When desktop computing got its start a good machine cost about $3,500, and to keep up with the technology you generally bought a machine every year or two and typically spent between $2,500 to $3,500 until the prices started to erode. By the time of the dot-com crash in 2000 a typical rig was selling for $1,500. Now its' gotten to the point where the median price is hovering around $800 and usable machines can be had for $400.

Instead of using Moore's Law to make machines more powerful, the "make them cheap" switch has been thrown and now everyone has a cheap machine in one form or another. The problem with cheap computing is that it's really not exciting. Moore's Law can affect performance, price and size. Size is the other direction the industry is going with the iPhone computing platform. This is another move away from the performance direction.

The trend, unfortunately, is not going to change. Once people get into cheap and small they seldom return to extravagance. So what do they do? They turn to old wine in new bottles. We'll just keep changing the name for everyth

While I can't comment on the logic behind the actions documented here, I can definitely say a word or two on what I believe to be the end of Craigslist's usefulness (at least for me).

About two years ago, I used Craigslist for everything. From iPhone purchases to small free stuff in my neighborhood (and others), Craigslist did it all. I even used its Personals section, which I actually had some success with (NO, not the NSA area...get your head out of there!).

Nowadays, every time I try to use Craigslist for those same purposes, I leave utterly disappointed. Almost every search I've run on the site has returned 95% SPAM. It's ridiculous that I can't trust a single entry because spam on there has gotten clever enough to resemble real listings. If you're even thinking of finding a mate on there, don't; it's a cesspool of fakes and cheap prostitutes. If I've left Craigslist for that reason, so has many other people, which means that it gets more noise, less hits.

I understand that the service is free, but let's put things in perspective. This very site sees ridiculously high traffic on a daily basis, yet does a very good job at moderating spam postings on EVERY discussion. We get dupes and stupidity, sure, but not (that much) spam.

Kind of sad, really. I shouldn't have to use eBay to buy something from a seller 5 miles away and hope that he's cool with local pickup...

(BTW: That project is awesome.)

Very true. Craigslist is the new classifieds section for cars (I just bought my car from a craigslist ad actually). But I had to use crazedlist.org to search, because I was willing to drive as far as needed to get the car I wanted. Craigslist's lack of features and resistance to third party addons breeds sites like crazedlist, a complete hack relying on iframes and you turning off referrals in your browser. And crazedlist itself sucks, it just adds an obvious feature that craigslist refuses to add.

Ultimately I just wrote my own setup that worked very much like Yahoo Pipes, but without the GUI to configure things (I just wrote perl code to do what I wanted) and it also did caching of the RSS feeds for a while and if there was an error it would simply work with the cached data rather than failing. Took a while to get right, but now that I have it working properly, I love it.

Same with housing, at least in New York Cty. It's almost all shady brokerage firms (one was a total bait and switch job) that neglect key details, such as addresses, in their listings. Trying to find something near school when the neighborhood option for craiglist encompasses about 40-60 blocks on the west side is some what fruitless. I love craigslist in theory, but sometimes I wish the rules were a bit stiffer.

But Microsoft has 93,000 employees and $58 billion in revenue, and Google has 20,000 employees and $22 billion in revenue (I'm quoting revenue, seeing as wages come out of revenue, not out of profit).

So Craigslist pulls in $4,687,500 per employee, Microsoft $623,655 per employee and Google $1,100,000 per employee.

Don't forget that Craigslist likely has the lowest R&D costs and investment costs out of any of the three.

This is understandable, this may be innocent intentions at work, but in my experience running a service, you often find that people want your users, even if there is no real gain. People crave power, greed is a symptom of that. I ran an irc network for several years, while it wasnt wildly successful (it still exists, but the average user count is now below 25 at any given time vs. 250+ users.) However, even with that tiny amount of users, Almost a month would go by before I'd find someone else attempting to hijack the network in favor of their own, either through botfloods, or spamming their "webchat services" for my network, and if you checked to see if they had IRC running, they did, and it was a near-complete copy of what I had running, with a few exceptions. Then the delusional idiots who thought they could persuade me through vague and fictitious legal threats that I somehow had to give them power by law, and step down.

Funny, but it shows, that even with any sizeable group, someone wants a piece of the pie, or the whole thing, they want to feel empowered over someone else. That's what many of these people wanted, power to hold over others. I just wanted to provide some free chat services, and learn from the ordeal. Ultimately I learned that it isnt worth it and your users will almost always hate you if you're too giving, as they demand more and hold no respect for you. But sadly, some people see things for more than that.
Hell, the craziest attempt was when one guy told me point blank that he will take my network over, he even said he'd take over freenode, and use his new powers to take down world governments, and that he was "the one".

Fun times.

TFS states explicitly that they were "one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source". So even if they were nice enough to cache everything, that doesn't mean all the Yahoo pipes users where. From the perspective of Craigslist there is probably no way to distinguish between them, so it only takes one malicious (or more likely, stupid) scraper to ruin it for everybody.

I think Yahoo pipes is, in retrospect, not such a great idea really.

eBay. Okay, okay, I kid. But seriously, Craigslist could easily be several times its current size if it just offered features that cause people to want to use other services. Lack of location awareness is my number one (with all that it entails.) It makes me look on eBay before I search other-region craigslists, for example; if I want to list something that I expect someone out of my area may want to buy, I won't even consider listing it on CL.