OLX: Craigslist + modern-looking UI - traffic | Hacker News Reader

OLX: Craigslist + modern-looking UI - traffic

olx.com

10 pointsbyrneseyeview22 comments

Dozens of words trapped in tiny prison cells, struggling to be free. And a design with so little character that it makes me worry that I've stumbled upon a domain squatter.

No community features, like discussion forums. No Best-of-Craigslist. Perhaps nobody cares enough about this bland site to craft such a thing?

Having said that, for all I know OLX would be crushing Craigslist if only the rip-off/ripped-off relationship were reversed.

Actually, I like it. I wanted to look at vehicles and it was far easier to browse than craigslist, cause there are pictures right next to the thing like ebay.

Though, yeah, its not as community oriented maybe?

Bookmarked.

Actually, I like it. I wanted to look at vehicles and it was far easier to browse than craigslist, cause there are pictures right next to the thing like ebay.

Here we see the problem with a front-page design that screams "clone": Visitors like me click away without learning about your site's unique new features!

If they stuck a sample vehicle ad somewhere on the front page the site might become much stickier. They'd at least look like they were trying.

Finding the room on the page without losing valuable links might be a problem, though. Maybe if they took out all those framed boxes they might find room for a thumbnail?

I open up links I want to read in tabs, and then revisit them. I closed the tab for this twice, thinking that it was a squatted domain that I'd somehow browsed to. The third time, I stopped to see what it was.

OXL is big over seas in Europe. At Flugpo we are trying to build a craigslist competitor as well though we still have some work to do before we are ready for the big time.

http://www.flugpo.com

One of the beautiful things about craigslist is that it is a holdover from the early days of the web. It is a snapshot of what we all once were.

I hope they never give in to the temptation to redesign.

(And it doesn't hurt that it is blazing fast.)

And here's one of the hideous things.

Maybe I don't understand how to do this, but there seems to be no way to search for something in all of, for example, Massachusetts instead of its separate geographic regions.

If that's the way it is, it's ridiculous and if it's not obvious how to do a broader search, that's also ridiculous.

Craigslist deliberately forces you to interact within your local sphere. It may suck if you're on the border of two of their regions, but it helps them keep a local focus. They could easily implement nationwide search.

I'm surprised no one's built an app that just spiders the craigslist database and allows you to query it in more interesting ways than the craigslist developers could think of.

There have been NUMEROUS apps that provide beefed-up searching (multi-city,etc.) for CraigsList. Most get in trouble with CL because they're violating CL's TOS.

Craig and Company want you on their site, not on an aggregation site that sucks their listings...so they shut aggregators and scrapers down pretty quickly. OLX is, if I recall correctly, one of the many companies that has already gotten in trouble for doing this.

I don't see what goal of theirs is facilitated by having a crippled search function. Someone in a border is going to look in the neighboring regions anyway - it just makes it painful for them and leaves the door open for a more sensible competitor.

<search term> site:<city>.craigslist.org on Google seems to work pretty well.

They received VC money (U$S 15 million).

So, we are on a bubble, or we are not seeing something.

they're pretty big outside of the US. So it's not exactly another ill-advised VC funding

I had always thought that Craigslist was poorly designed, but I've changed my mind. This site is, ostensibly, better designed. But I still had to look around for about 15 seconds before I found what I was looking for.

The way that the Craiglist headings are designed is really great, actually. With large headers you lose vertical separation, and this is especially valuable in visualizing the "search | categories | cities" split.

The Craiglist design may not be a happy accident of bad web design. I think it was done very carefully.

I have to laugh when I hear people say they could "build a better-looking Craigslist" in "a few months" or "a few weeks" or "a weekend" [or insert your own timeframe.] Craigslist isn't just some simple bulletin board software and forums that Craig put up on the Web one night -- it's the result of years of steady growth, good customer service, good word-of-mouth, and just good business. Sure, you could build a localized classified ads service that looks "more modern" -- meaning it uses gradients for no good reason other than everyone else is using them -- but that's no Craiglist.

Now, if you have a site that somehow gets past some major problem or irritation that Craiglist users face, then maybe you've got a chance. But if you're just putting a new coat of paint on an old, well-executed idea, I'm not seeing the opportunity there.

The founder/CEO of this site is Fabrice Grinda (http://www.fabricegrinda.com/), who was interviewed on Venture Voice a while back (http://www.venturevoice.com/2005/12/vv_show_21_fabrice_grind...). His interview was one of my favorites.

He's got an interesting approach to entrepreneurship -- rather than coming up with novel ideas, Fabrice takes ideas that work in one location and replicates them somewhere else. First he built (and sold) the eBay of Latin America + Europe, then he brought ringtones to America from Asia (!). After selling his ringtone company for $80M, he founded OLX, to bring craigslist to other countries.

Check out his interview; you'll learn a lot.

It looks like a domain squatter page. I was surprised there was no "This domain may be for sale!" link.

the traffic problem is worse than you think, I believe they don't remove any old listings. So you may see 80,000 items, but only a dozen were posted in the last week

Their model focuses on providing listings to other.

Ex: http://olx.friendster.com/

( UI / Navigation of OLX ) < ( UI / Navigation of http://www.adsglobe.com/ )

Holy layout tables batman! The UI looks like Craig's list with a little Web 2.0 gloss... not very modern to me.

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