The New York Times > Technology > An Online Pioneer Resists the Lure of Cashing In - NYT printed a nice story about Craig's List due to the big event of EBay buying a stake in the company. In my interviews with movers Craig's list came up several times, with respondents routinely singing praises to it. It truly think these praises were where they were due.
There is one thing that Craig's list succeeded at doing where most failed. It created a social space where people feel like they are interacting with people like them (and these are quite different people). Another interesting thing that we observed was the secondary effect of Craig's list listings. I think in general, this could be extrapolated to a secondary effect of online presence for physical locations, but it happened in the context of craig's list only.
In effect, users found apartment listsings on the site and went to take a look. The apartments they found were absolutely atrocious, but there was one next door that turned out to be perfect. This suggests a curious thing - at a certain point of adoption/penetration of a particular technology, not everyone needs to have an online presence to enjoy effects of it. In fact, these rental properties essentially piggy-backed the efforts of the property that put itself on Craig's list, because the latter increased non-local traffic. By the same token, I wonder if this is happening to individuals - that is, if someone is not using a particular technology but people around them are, then the non-users will experience secondary effects of access and use. I wonder what these might be.
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