NeighborGoods is currently in alpha testing and accepting users by invitation until October 7th, when it launches publicly. But it is already gaining traction on Twitter (where Krimmel has over 12,000 followers) with people who have early access to the website, like @typefiend, who shared this note:

"Set up my first #Neighborgoods transaction. Someone's borrowing the Bissell Carpet Cleaner for some pet cleanup. http://bit.ly/lh6gR"

Krimmel said she's reaching out to church groups, school groups, green organizations, and mommy groups to get them active on the site and to help identify what goods and services NeighborGoods should target. The site will also launch a Facebook Connect feature.

"We think people will share with people they know at first," says Krimmel. "We want to get people over that hurdle and start telling the story of things: power tools, ladders, camping gear, bicycles. Those are the things we all have in the garage that don't get used very often. I'm hoping that the groups feature will have people sharing all kinds of crazy stuff."

NeighborGoods is fairly intuitive to use, but its success will depend on the quality and usefulness of items offered by the community. A quick look this morning found items ranging from an old analog TV to a wireless router to someone's dog (condition "beat up"). The policing of what's made available and whether the site monitors users will be key to its development. Users are rated, similar to how sellers are ranked on eBay, but what's not clear is what recourse someone has if they don't get a favorite book back or a neighbor breaks their lawnmower.

The service is one of several new barter-type platforms to emerge in the past few months. Where Couchsurfing left off with the post-college hostel crowd, Caravan is picking up, providing access to house-swap listings and rentals for creative professionals. And hungry Angelenos are using Fallen Fruit to find in-season treats from trees around L.A.

All of these projects seem to have a two-fold purpose: getting resources that you need or want, and making new friends in the process. Is using NeighborGoods easier or more productive than just ringing the doorbell? That remains to be seen.

Guest author: Laura Hertzfeld is a freelance journalist based in Los Angeles. In addition to writing for ReadWriteWeb, she is managing editor of EconomyStory.org, a Public Radio Exchange (PRX) project aggregating public media coverage of the economy.

Garage sales are no longer just for blue-haired grandmothers with teacup fetishes. While eBay and Etsy are great for selling rare or specialty items, setting up an auction or store for your mismatched cutlery might not get you the results you need. One blessing in this down economy is that we're learning to reclaim and recycle in a way that our grandmothers have been doing for years. Whether you like haggling over weird items on a Sunday or you'd simply like to list your own sale, here are some great resources.

2. GSALR: This site improves where Craigslist leaves off. While it does not offer images from sales, it does offer a map of the region, an RSS feed on new listings and a trip planner for multi-sale routes. Garage Sale Nation offers a similar tool, and the most results seem to appear in Massachusetts, Virginia, New York and Michigan.

Yard Sale Search: This site is extremely bare bones, but if you're just looking for a site to list all of the multi-family sales in your area, the results are quick and plentiful.

3. ZipGarage: ZipGarage is a site where garage sale hunters type in their postal code and receive results on sales in their area. RWW first wrote about ZipGarage in 2007. While this site is perhaps one of the best designed garage sale sites, it still lacks the users. If you're having a sale, you might still want to embed the widget to give directions to your users.

4. Upcoming and Facebook Events: Your friends DO want to buy your junk, or at the very least they want to spend Sunday drinking beer on your lawn. A great way to kick start a yard sale is to reach out to your online networks, prepare some sandwiches and treat the event like a lawn party. Upcoming and Facebook events offer great ways to announce localized events and the best part is that your friends are likely to get calendar reminders for your sale.

5. Twitter, Loopt: These location-based services are great for that last minute sale push or reminder. While nearby followers might not have planned to buy anything, if they're in the area, they just might stop by for an impulse purchase.

6.The Local Paper and Craigslist: We're sure you already know about these options, but if you're having a sale, it would be silly not to list here. With Craigslist, users can narrow their search by neighborhood and keyword, and choose to specify only those results that contain images.

*Final Tips for Sellers: After you've tweeted, listed and advertised your yard sale, remember that old school rules still apply. Some of the must-haves of a garage sales include ample signage, properly labeled tables, extra boxes and bags, a measuring tape for furniture and about $100 in small bills and quarters for change.

Take consumer electronics site Woya, for example. When faced with the daunting task of buying a new laptop without the requisite Gs needed to make that process sufficiently simple, I have been paralyzed into procrastination. In about 30 seconds, Woya showed me inexpensive, well reviewed laptops I wanted from eBay, Craigslist, Overstock, Amazon, and other sites. It did the legwork and analytics for me, making the process entirely painless.

Users can check out results from retail sites, auction sites, and online classifieds from three simple tabs on the product page. They can scope out specs and reviews for a given product, and Woya lets the user know if they think now is a good time to find good deals on the product. The Deal Digger function is particularly useful, similar to Priceline's name-your-own-price function. Users can select parameters and get real-time updates if and when the selected product becomes available at a given price point.

Woya also shows trends and analytics for the product:

Of course, there are social sharing options, and the site apparently allows users to login via OpenID (although this process was a bit buggy and ultimately dysfunctional on my end, perhaps because of a Chrome-related browser incompatibility issue).

All things being equal, Woya's consumer-friendly, ad-free, highly detailed, comparison shopping approach reminded us of discount travel sites such as Priceline, Travelocity, Expedia, and their like. Those sites enjoy their tremendous popularity for good reasons: They have taken a boring, painful process and made it easier, faster, and less expensive for the end user. For a small, Bay Area-based startup barely six months old with just one full-time employee, Woya has done a great deal to simplify and streamline online shopping in a powerful and unique way. We'd love to see the site grow to encompass all verticals of consumer products.

In return, Craigslist has now filed its own suit in federal court in South Carolina, "seeking declaratory relief and a restraining order with respect to criminal charges he [McMaster] has repeatedly threatened against Craigslist and its executives."

In his ultimatum, McMaster asks Craigslist to "remove the portions of the Internet site dedicated to South Carolina and its municipal regions which contain categories for and functions allowing for the solicitation of prostitution and the dissemination and posting of graphic pornographic material" within ten (10) days." Given that anybody can post anything on Craigslist (except for the new 'Adult Services' section, which is now closely monitored), this is far too broad a statement and Buckmaster rightly argues that Craigslist would just have to close shop in South Carolina.

The South Carolina "adult services" section of Craigslist currently only features a few ads, and they are about as tame as the ads for chatlines for singles that run on late-night TV all over the country. At this point, most ads just feature a (non-pornographic) photo and a phone number.

A number of legal experts have argued that the "safe harbor" provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) protects Craigslist from criminal prosecution, as, according to the DMCA, an "interactive computer service" can not be held responsible for content posted on the service's site.

Connecticut's Attorney General, Richard Blumenthal, called Craigslist "a blatant Internet brothel". And given all the negative publicity around the service (including the story of the "Craigslist killer" that kept tabloids and local TV news shows stocked with material for days in April), the company clearly decided that it was time to revamp the red light section of its service.

It is important to note, though, that it doesn't seem like Craigslist could actually be held accountable for the ads placed in its site, instead, it rather seems like the company simply gave in to the mounting pressure.

There is, of course, no denying that the French teachers that advertise in Craigslist's "Erotic Services" (ES) section are probably not trained linguists. By 11am this morning, the ES section for Portland, OR (link is SFW, but everything after that is not) already featured over 300 ads, very few of which we could even post a screenshot of here on RWW.

Reborn as "Adult Services" - With Adult Supervision

Craiglist, however, is not shutting the ES section down completely. Instead, it will be reborn as a new "adult services" section, where all posts will be reviewed before they are published on the site (to ensure that they are from "legal adult service providers"). New ads will cost $10, and can be reposted for $5.

Of course, we can't help but think that this will only drive the erotic services providers to other outlets (or, even worse, back on the street). We also can't help but wonder what euphemisms advertisers in the new "adult services" section will come up with to still sell their wares on Craigslist. Or, as our own Jolie O'Dell pointed out in our RWW backchannel, maybe this will turn out to be a boon for the newspaper industry and alternative weekly newspapers, who might just pick up some extra classified ads in the near future.

CC-licensed images used courtesy of Flickr users MoToMo and Benimoto.

Popular playlist sharing site Muxtape got taken down by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in mid-August and it is unfortunately still non-operational. The fact is that Muxtape didn't pay its internet radio licensing fees. In our recent RWW Live podcast on online music, Lucas Gonze (creator of similar playlist service Webjay, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2006) said that Muxtape was "trying to become a big service, i.e. get too big to fail and so cut a deal [with labels]." Unfortunately Muxtape failed to escape the notice of the RIAA.

NetShare (iPhone app)

Nullriver's NetShare was an iPhone app that, according to Gizmodo, allowed you to tether your laptop to your iPhone using the handset's 3G modem as your laptop's own. Basically this let you have full Internet access on your laptop without Wi-Fi, for free. There was talk that this violates AT&T's terms of service, but whatever the reason the app has been pulled from Apple's App Store. The last message on the site is dated 4 August and states: "We're working with Apple to get NetShare back up on the AppStore." But we're not holding our breath.

Image courtesy of Gizmodo

The CLQ

Adam Steinberg of EventVue wrote in to tell us that he misses The CLQ (the acronym stands for Champions League for Quake style games). It's an app that kept track of "millions of game players (Quake, Unreal, Half-life, Tribes, etc.) on thousands of online game servers." It was a very popular app in its niche, however it was stopped. The developers claim that this was due to "incredible amounts of e-mail, GameSpy monopolizing access to game servers, constant upgrading of hardware and software to process increased traffic, games getting their own statistics, etc."

The good news for CLQ fans is that one of the developers, Nico de Vries, is currently working on a version 2.0.

PubSub

PubSub was one of our favorite 'future search' products back in the early days of web 2.0 - you could enter keywords and the product would deliver search results to you automatically. This feature is now common place in news sites, for example Google News has it, but back in '03-'05 PubSub was an innovator.

So it was a great product, but PubSub spectacularly imploded in mid-2006 after founder Bob Wyman blogged about "internal political issues". Wyman left the company shortly after and the product sunk along with its creator. Perhaps PubSub will rise again, because apparently it still exists today. Here is the message on its frontpage currently:

Others have risen since to take over the reins in future search. A few of our favorites are ZapTXT, FeedRinse and BlastFeed. We discussed those and other services here. But we'll always have a soft spot for PubSub...

AllPeers

In March we heard that P2P browser plug-in AllPeers had shut down, a blow to a market that seemed very promising back in 2006. AllPeers set out to add "file sharing to the web browser". Technically the service seemed fine, however the reason for the closure according to the company was that "we have not achieved the kind of growth in our user base that our investors were expecting, and as a result we are not able to continue operating the service."

Scrabulous (Facebook app)

We reported in April that Scrabulous, the extremely popular but unauthorized Scrabble Facebook app, was under fire from Hasbro and Mattel. Those two companies own the rights to Scrabble - Hasbro in North America, and Mattel in the rest of the world. In July the bigcos had their way and Scrabulous was taken offline.

After more legal ducking and weaving, in which the app was first pulled in North America and then internationally too, the app got re-born under the name Wordscraper. It uses circles instead of Scrabble-like square tiles. Unfortunately the change isn't proving too popular. This comment by a Facebook user is an example of the reaction:

"I loved Scrabulous !
Wordscraper is kinda the same but I do not like the round tiles , it makes it difficult to play , kinda messes everything together, change it to SQUARES and it would be alot better."

The old version, with squares

Pandora

OK you can still use Pandora in the US, despite concerns that it might be on the verge of closing. But those of us who live outside the US haven't been able to access this lovely music discovery service for too long a time.

Qumana

Tris Hussey tweeted to tell us that Qumana was a great java-based blog editor, "easy and light." Unfortunately it is not being updated anymore and the homepage isn't accessible.

Crgslst

Back in March we reported on a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist, called crgslst. As we noted, Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind." We noted at the time that crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past.

Indeed this has turned out to be the case. Currently when you visit crglst, you are greeted with this despairing pop-up message:

ShareYourOPML

This site for sharing OPML files was "retired" by creator Dave Winer in January. He wrote at the time that "now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't."

The good news for OPML fans is that Toluu has risen to fill the void. We reviewed it in March, noting that it lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. We were impressed by the service, even more so in May when enhancements were announced.

So perhaps, sometimes, there is a silver lining in the dark cloud of web apps that close or get shut down!

Have Your Say

Tell us in the comments which web apps have disappeared in recent times that you used to love. Also let us know if anything has come along since that you perhaps like even better.

TeachStreet is based in Seattle and raised a $2.25 million Series A round led be Madrona Venture Group in February 2008. TeachStreet's strategy for now seems to be to roll the service out slowly, one metro area at a time. Currently, Portland and Seattle are the only locations officially available on the site, though teaches from anywhere can list their classes on the site as well.

TeachStreet aggregates classes from various sources and allows teachers to list their own classes (or claim a class that TeachStreet already lists). At least for the Portland area, most of the classes listed on the site are from local community colleges, community organizations, and language or music schools. Teachstreet wants to inspire local experts to start teaching, but for now, it seems that it is mostly established teachers and schools who are listing their services on the site.

Finding Classes

TeachStreet's search functions are very comprehensive and allow prospective students to restrict their search to different class sizes, age groups, ability levels, and days of the week a given class is offered. In our tests, the results we got from the search were typically very acurate (down to the days and times the classes were offered).

But What About Craigslist?

TeachStreet's most direct competitor is obviously Craigslist. In contrast to Craigslist, though, TechStreet offers its data in a far more structured way and it allows students to leave reviews of classes as well. TeachStreet's inventory of classes is also a lot more comprehensive than anything Craigslist could offer. Some enterprising TeachStreet users have, however, found a way of using TeachStreet as a tool to create Craigslist ads.

Another competitor for TeachStreet is Takelessons.com, though it focusses mostly on music, dance, and acting lessons and hence has a slightly more restricted inventory of classes.

TeachStreet is an interesting tool, both for teachers to gain more visibility, and for students to find the right classes. Thanks to its excellent search functions and well-designed layout, it stands a good chance of making a name for itself as it continues to roll out its service accross the US.

Social Classifieds

The new classifieds section is also going to make better use of MySpace's social tools, allowing users to target their MySpace friends for their listings. This social aspect is what can give classifieds on MySpace (or any social network for that matter) a competitive advantage over Craigslist. At the same time, though, it's noteworthy, as Caroline McCarthy also points out, that Facebook's classifieds section has never quite become an important service on the site.

The only classifieds sites Oodle doesn't scrape are Craigslist and Kijiji. The relationship between Craiglist and Oodle has been especially rocky, as we reported here. By basically providing a meta-search service, Oodle relies less on its own active users to provide a comprehensive service.

The most advanced features of the MySpace integration, however, only work for ads posted by MySpace users themselves. Right now, there are not too many active listings posted by MySpace users, yet. However, as these ads start making their way onto users' profiles, using MySpace Classifieds for ads could easily become a viral phenomenon on MySpace.

Participants in today's RWW Live were: ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati, Steve O'Hear from our network blog last100, myself, Bernard Lunn and Marshall Kirkpatrick. You can listen to the podcast below.

One of the players, SugarSync (RWW review here), today announced a development that further blurs the lines between synchronisation and collaboration services. With SugarSync's new functionality users can send any file from their desktop, web or mobile SugarSync application, regardless of the size of the file or number of recipients.

Once recipients have started downloading the files, the sender receives a notification advising them of the fact. SugarSync also time limits the email to 1 day to further enhance security.

Why this changes the synchronisation game

Previously synchronisation services were primarily about multiple device access and backup. LiveMesh has promised collaboration but this has been Windows-centric. SugarSync solution is cross-platform and as such heralds something of a game-change.

SugarSync in action

I've been using SugarSync for around six months now to back-up and sync files between multiple machines and the web. My experience has been exactly what one would hope for with a service like this - seamless and silent. SugarSync works in the background and keeps everything beautifully up to date. Every now and then I find myself taking a peek to make sure that the product has done what it's meant to and, as yet, I haven't been let down.

The changes rolled out today give SugarSync a point of difference over some of the other sync providers, while taking a large step into the domain of the collaboration solution providers.

A guest post by Ben Kepes of diversity.net.nz, a blog that focuses on SaaS, cloud-computing and Web 2.0 for the real world

In many ways, Commuto reminds me of BookMooch. BookMooch is an international and highly active community for swapping books. Users add books from their library to the system and can trade them for books from other users (or donate them to charities as well). Every user gets a certain number of credits per book, depending on if the book is send overseas or locally.

Commuto takes a very similar approach, but with a focus on trading items locally and instead of a credit system, users have to barter among themselves for what they want to get in return for their items. Commuto only initiates the contact between the two parties. While the text on the site seems to imply that users will mostly swap one item for another, users could also decide on a cash price as well.

Going Global

Commuto does quite a few things right. Adding your own items to the system is as easy as entering a UPC code from the packaging (or just entering the data by hand if you don't have the packaging with the code anymore). Also, just in the last few days, Comuto expanded outside of the US to most European and South American countries, as well as Israel and Australia.

Unlike Craigslist, Commuto also has a reputation system for its users. This has definitely helped eBay overcome some users' fears of trading used items with relatively anonymous traders and will surely help Commuto overcome similar fears among its users.

There are currently still a few inconsistencies in the user interface. Why, for example, can't you add communities under the 'communities' tab? Instead, you have to edit your profile. Commuto's developers have responded quickly to quite a number of problems on the site, though, so I assume that they will fix some of these minor problems pretty quickly as well.

Finding Users

Like a lot of similar products, Commuto is still in its early phase of getting enough users to become useful. Its largest user base is in Los Angeles right now, with just over 600 users, but in San Francisco it only has 31 users so far. Commuto would probably work very well on college campuses (a market they specifically target). Given how compact most campuses are, Commuto would be an ideal system for trading textbooks, CDs, or games.

Commuto's biggest competitor is most likely Craigslist. Unlike Commuto, a user on Craigslist can assume that a listing is going to be seen by hundreds of people. Commuto also competes with eBay on some levels, but given that its emphasis isn't so much on making money from trades and more on trading items within a local community, they don't seem to overlap too much.

Commuto is definitely a service worth checking out, especially if you are trying to set up a marketplace for a relatively compact community like a college campus.

That's a real shame because there's already some very interesting looking content there. This is a solvable problem, though.

Half for fun and half for work, we created an RSS feed for the new Craigslist blog that you can subscribe to below. That blog should be interesting, but if it ends up half as interesting as the Best of Craigslist section of the site - then look out Technorati 100.

The New Craigslist Blog

Full feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigslistblog2

The body of the posts won't be delivered in this feed, as we struggled to scrape a feed at all using Feed43. When I say we, in this case, I mean my dashingly handsome and brilliant co-blogger Josh Catone.

Unfortunately, you can't take for granted that anything you build on top of Craigslist is going to survive, even if it solves a problem over there. The beautiful multi-city search tool Crgslst got shut down days after we wrote about it here. Luckily the wonderful Image preview extension for Firefox still works - check that one out.

The Best of Craigslist

The feed URL below will deliver the items on the Best of Craigslist page - warning lots of naughty words - very funny stuff. Even the Best of Craigslist's own native RSS feed is broken, so we scraped that too. Anybody who said you couldn't build a huge company online without giving RSS its due was obviously wrong.

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BestofCraigslist2

As was pointed out by one of our fantastic commenters, it turns out there is a full feed available for Best of Craigslist at feed://www.craigslist.org/about/best/all/index.rss. Though for some reason the page itself doesn't have the URL right.

We hope you enjoy these feeds. Isn't RSS a wonderful thing? We sure think so here at RWW.

Google's pranks each year are probably the most anticipated on the web. Last year, they hit users with two: Sewage-based home WiFi, and printed Gmail. Other classics from the Google prank archive include: the Google Mentalplex, Google Gulp, Google's jobs on the moon, Google PigeonRank, and Google Romance.

Being the tricksters they are, Google also sometimes makes some extaordinary real announcements on April 1, like in 2004 when it used a rather tongue-in-cheek press release to announce Gmail. Google also inspires others to create Google-centric pranks, such as Google Maps Rooms from Google Blogoscoped in 2006.

2. Ebay

Auction site eBay is another great place to trawl for April Fools jokes. Some intrepid auctioneer usually tries to pull a prank each year, perhaps most famously that distinction fell to prop-maker Dan Baines. In 2006 he caused quite a stir when he put up for sale what was purported to be the body of a dead "fairy" on the site. It took him days to respond to all the email he got as a result. ""I've had all sorts of comments including people who say they've seen exactly the same things and one person who told me to return the remains to the grave site as soon as possible or face the consequences," he told the BBC.

Sometimes people play off of other pranks on eBay as well. In 2005, one could find invites to Google's fictitious "Gulp" program being auctioned off on the site.

3. ThinkGeek

Geek-friendly shopping site ThinkGeek sometimes gets in on the Apirl Fools Day act by putting up all sorts of fanciful objects for sale. Last year, for example, they offered the Wii Helmet and inhalable caffeine sticks.

4. Wikipedia

While the validity of Wikipedia for serious research is in doubt already, don't be surprised if everyone's favorite crowd-sourced encyclopedia site gets just a tad be more unreliable tomorrow. In 2005, for example, the site announced that it had been taken over by Encyclopedia Britannica. The article, now labeled a hoax, claimed that the new encyclopedia would cost £99.97/page to edit.

5. NASA

The American space organization has been pulling a prank on its "Astronomy Picture of the Day site on April 1 for many years. Some of the best include last year's space Quidditch match, 2003's Ollie the Owl constellation, and 1998's lunar field goal. Our favorite, though, is 2005's hilarious Water on Mars -- pictured below.

6. Facebook

Though a newcomer to the fraternity of April Fools prankers, Valley-darling Facebook got in on the act last year with some interesting stuff delivered to users via the News Feed. They announced their new "LivePoke!" feature, in which users could pay to have their friends literally poked by a real person. They sent out humorous relationship updates, such as, "Harry and Voldemort have set their relationship status to 'Mortal Enemies.'" And existential status updates like, "You are on Facebook, reading your News Feed." They even announced, much to the chagrin of sports fans everywhere, that Ohio State and Florida -- who were set to meet in the 2007 NCAA championship basketball game -- had mututally agreed upon a tie.

7. Blizzard

Blizzard entertainment, makers of the ultra-popular "World of Warcraft" games, likes to have a little fun with its fans on April Fools Day. In 2006, for example, they announced the creation of BurgerCraft, a chain of theme restaurants based on their games. "At BurgerCraft, players will have a chance to truly taste the flavor of Blizzard's games and savor traditional dishes from all the company’s popular game universes," the company wrote in a bogus press release that included the names of some of the dishes that would be served at the restaurants, such as, Red Dragon Wings, Zealot Fries, and the Frost Shock Smoothie.

Last year, Blizzard got in on the act again by announcing the World of Warcraft tinfoil hat which was of course the "logical result of [a] profound insight, combining tinfoil's powerful mental shielding properties with the excellent counter-hexing effect of troll tears and the outstanding mind-focus powers of one of Azeroth's most precious gems."

8. HowStuffWorks

Beginning in 2006 HowStuffWorks has begun to put up a fake article on the first of April each year. So far, they've been must-reads. In 2006 it was animated tattoos, and last year they brought us cell phoe implants.

9. Craigslist

Though not a guaranteed place to seek out an official prank every year, the one that Craigslist pulled in 2002 was just too good not to mention. Known for its simple, and ad-free design, Craigslist has grown to be the largest classifieds sites in the US serving 27 million unique users monthly. In 2002, those users got quite a shock when founder Craig Newmark announced to its visitors that the site would start running banner ads.

"Craigslist represents virgin territory for banner ad placement," the site said on a page that even included a form for purchasing ads. However, even without the guarantee of an official prank, like eBay, expect Craigslist to be flooded with prank adverts tomorrow.

10. Newspapers

Newspaper, especially those in Britain, love to publish fake stories on April 1. Ever since the 1977 seven-page supplement published in the Guardian detailing life on the fictional island of San Serriffe, newspapers and magazines have been bonkers for April Fools Day hoaxes.

Just last year there was CNet's April 1 homepage, which sported some fanciful stories including the Dalai Lama being exiled to Second Life and a preview of a new Wii knitting game. There was the grow-your-own Viagra craze in the Independent, Tony Blair heading to the stage via the Observer, and the Register's fake story on Google and Apple joining forces to make a phone.

Conclusion

Of course, the web isn't the web isn't the only place you might be fooled. Companies have a long history of spending real money to put out fake news on April 1st. In 1998, for example, Burger King took out a a full page advertisement in USA Today announcing the "left handed Whopper" -- a new version of their famous burger specifically made for lefties. In 1996, Taco Bell announced that it had purchased the famed US historical landmark, "The Liberty Bell," and was renaming it -- you guessed it -- "The Taco Liberty Bell." So keep your eyes peeled, and remember to take everything you read tomorrow with a large helping of salt.

Even we're not immune. Late last year we reported that CoRank and Menéame had merged before realizing a tad too late that it was actually a prank for the Feast of the Holy Innocents, which is sort of a Latin American and Spanish equivalent of April Fools Day.

Be sure to check out April Fool's Day on the Web which has been attempting to catalog every web-based April Fool's Day gag since 2004. ]]>Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_places_to_get_fooled_on_april_1.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/top_10_places_to_get_fooled_on_april_1.php Trends Mon, 31 Mar 2008 11:34:35 -0800 Josh Catone Denver, Colorado based Superhero.es has built crgslst, a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind."

Unfortunately, crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past. This situation brings up a number of questions about intellectual property, RSS and mashups.

Additionally, you agree not to:... use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist;

What's an RSS feed though, but an API that lets 3rd parties download data from a site by automated means? Isn't Craigslist, or at least Housing Maps, the long-time darling of the mashup world? Some folks at least contend that an API is a way for noncommercial mashups to be developed without a lengthy, formal business development process.

There's no indication that crgslst has received any contact from Craigslist, but the history of similar services and the continued presence of the language above in the Terms of Use don't bode well.

Just the thought of a service like this getting shut down is sad. It's a great little site, offering a user experience that Craigslist itself would do well to offer. Who's IP is at work at crgslst, though?

For now, you can check out crgslst and see just one more example of the kinds of magic that becomes possible when a website offers its data in a standards-based format like RSS.

Currently, Kijiji has about 250,000 ads on the site -- compared to Craigslist, whose users post about 30 million new ads each month, that doesn't seem like many (to be fair, the Craigslist number includes international posts). But comparing stats with Craigslist will make everything Kijiji does look trivial, and that may not be the case.

A fight between eBay and Craigslist may look like David vs. Goliath (where Goliath is confusingly playing the part of David), but as eBay spokesman Jose Malbo told the New York Times in August, eBay believes that classifieds "is a very diverse market that clearly wants more choice." And as more local ad spending moves online and out of newspapers (local newspaper ad spending was down 8% in the first half of 2007), there appears to be a growing market that eBay can take a chunk of. Unlike Craigslist, eBay's classifieds site is built with a single goal in mind: making money.

According to Nielsen, Kijiji US is getting about 1.8 million visitors -- that's still well shy of the 20 million that Craigslist gets, but significant because no other small player has yet cracked the 1 million mark (Nielsen). That includes efforts from large companies like Microsoft, whose LiveExpo service has failed to capture much market share.

eBay plans to staff up Kijiji over the next year, and launch more localized versions of the site, like the Spanish language one it already launched in Miami. "We’ve had half a person dedicated to the U.S. launch," Kijiji VP and GM Jacob Aqraou told the New York Times. "Next year, we’ll fully be up to the level of resources we should be putting against this."