ReadWriteWeb

If you've ever used Craigslist before (and who hasn't?) then you know it can be amazingly useful for some things and a terrible waste of time for others. If you're a small business looking for an accountant or the best and cheapest way to outsource your HR, for example, then Craigslist might be asking for trouble.

Austin-based startup BidModo is launching a public beta today that hopes to simplify this process for small businesses and provide them with better information to make better decisions, instead of simply relying on word of mouth referrals.

A project that's been available to the public for just two months, TweetMart allows users to see items for sale and jobs in a Twitter-friendly format. Its co-founders "felt there needed to be a drop dead simple way to integrate a classifieds site with Twitter," according to the site.

Listings can be created on the site, although many are culled from Twitter posts, as well. Quick, simple, and free, TweetMart is still in the early stages of development but presents a great deal of potential for organizing the user-to-user - or even B2C - commercial use of Twitter.

Whether the venue is a local bar or a professional conference, we all meet people whose identities and contact information slip away before we can establish a more meaningful connection.

Although missed connections sections in personals and classifieds make for great reading on a boring Tuesday night, some kind of more powerful tool - with a greater share of the market - is needed to act as a beacon between social and professional ships passing in the night. One site among several devoted to this cause is the shiny, new Blinka.me, a very 2.0 version of your local alternative weekly's back pages.

Craigslist, the popular online classifieds service, announced a major revamp of its "erotic services" section today, which, until now, featured copious amounts of ads for prostitutes and escort services. The "erotic services" section will be closed and will be replaced by an "adult services" section, where Craigslist's customer service reps will review every ad before it can be posted. This decision comes after pressure from various political organizations on Craigslist mounted, and after the attorneys general of Connecticut, Missouri, and Illinois met with officials from Craigslist last week.

At the Accel Symposium, we heard John Donahoe, eBay CEO, admit that there was little synergy between core eBay, PayPal, and Skype. He lauded PayPal, showed some false modesty around Skype, and talked about core eBay in a way that indicated a clear understanding of its limitations and challenges. If that sounds a tad negative, that was not what I took away. What I did take away was that eBay is a great collection of parts, a really great collection of parts, that would be more valuable as independent entities.