That's an announcement we've all been waiting to see. The problem is...it's just not going to happen, at least not in the near future. That's because Craigslist defines the areas they service by city name, and by defining service areas by city name, they immediately create discrimination. You city is either IN or it's OUT.
There are an approximately 19,800 [440 ks] cities in the United States and Craigslist only works for 339 [4 ks] of them. They have to create a separate database for each city/region. That's why you can't search across multiple cities using Craigslist.
When you go to Craigslist and select Kansas, you get a list of 4 cities that are supported: Lawrence, Manhattan, Topeka, Wichita, and a link to “suggest a new one”. The link gets you to a forum where 780 people have asked [and some begged] to have their Kansas small-town included. “Please add Leavenworth, Kansas”. “Please add Salina, Kansas”. “Add more cities to the Kansas list, we need Dodge city , Libral and Greatbend added to Kansas Craigslist.”
There is an alternative...so we don't have to wait any longer.
I live in a rural area outside of a small town in California and I got tired of begging to have our town added to the Craigslist site. I decided I'd had enough of the discrimination, so 10 months ago a friend and I started to program a website that provided the same elements as Craigslist and Freecycle plus allowed people to publish user created local news and information to their communities.
The big difference is that our new site works the same in every city and rural area in the country because we don't define geographic areas at all. Instead, we use Google maps to position each posting by it's location on the surface of the earth...by latitude and longitude.
Our search engine returns the results of each search in distance order from where you choose to center your search. So if you're looking for a bike, a job or just some local news near by where you live, you get the 50 closest posts on a map of your community. And because it's mapped and not based on a city name, you can post 20 miles outside of the nearest town and it still works for you.
Finally...it's ready....well, good enough. It's been tested in our community. Now we want to see if it works for the people we made it for. YOU. Small-Town rural America. And because Kansas communities are small, rural, spread out, and smack-dab in the center of our country...there is no better place.
We've added a few postings so it doesn't look completely empty when you go to Kansas. The City-Data town pages are the best there is so we started making posts linking to them for many of the towns to give you an idea how it works.
Keep in mind that you get the 50 closest posts to your search location so until you start posting your own things in Kansas, you'll see the ones all the way out here in California.
This City-Data.com forum is supported by an excellent group of people. You can tell by the quality of the postings found here. What we'd like to know: Are there enough people here willing to help us try this out in Kansas?
If you are interested in taking a look. You can find the site by Googling 4grabs or you can find a link to the home page in the contact area of my user profile.
If you like what you see...please come back here and tell others what you think.
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“Craigslist Comes To Rural And Small-Town Kansas”... why this will never happen.
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