Craigslist (stylized as craigslist) is an American classified advertisements website with sections devoted to jobs, housing, for sale, items wanted, services, community service, gigs...
Craig Newmark began the service in 1995 as an email distribution list to friends, featuring local events in the San Francisco. It became a web based service in 1996 and expanded into other categories. It started expanding to other U.S. and Canadian cities in 2000, and now covers more 70 countries.
In March 2008, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese became the first non English languages supported. As of August 9, 2012, over 700 cities and areas in 70 countries had Craigslist sites. Some Craigslist sites cover large regions instead of individual metropolitan areas for example, the U.S. states of Delaware and Wyoming, the Colorado Western Slope, the California Gold Country are among the locations with their own Craigslist sites. Craigslist sites for some large cities, such as Los Angeles, also include the ability for the user to focus on a specific area of a city.
History
Having observed people helping one another in friendly, social, and trusting communal ways on the Internet via the WELL, MindVox and Usenet, and feeling isolated as a relative newcomer to San Francisco, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark decided to create something similar for local events. In early 1995, he began an email distribution list to friends. Most of the early postings were submitted by Newmark and were notices of social events of interest to software living and working in the San Francisco.
Soon, word of mouth led to rapid growth. The number of subscribers and postings grew rapidly. There was no moderation and Newmark was surprised when people started using the mailing list for non-event postings. People trying to get technical positions filled found that the list was a good way to reach people with the skills they were looking for. This led to the addition of a jobs category. User demand for more categories caused the list of categories to grow. The initial technology encountered some limits, so by June 1995 Majordomo had been installed and the mailing list "Craigslist" resumed operations. Community members started asking for a web interface. Newmark registered "craigslist.org", and the website went live in 1996.
In the fall of 1998, the name "List Foundation" was introduced and Craigslist started transitioning to the use of this name. In April 1999, when Newmark learned of other organizations called "List Foundation", the use of this name was dropped. Craigslist incorporated as a private for-profit company in 1999. Around the time of these events, Newmark realized the site was growing so fast that he could stop working as a software engineer and devote his full attention to running Craigslist.
In January 2000, current CEO Jim Buckmaster joined the company as lead programmer and CTO. Buckmaster contributed the site's multi-city architecture, search engine, discussion forums, flagging system, self-posting process, homepage design, personals categories, and best-of-Craigslist feature. He was promoted to CEO in November 2000.
The website expanded into nine more U.S. cities in 2000, and 14 in 2003. On August 1, 2004, Craigslist began charging $25 to post job openings on the New York and Los Angeles pages. On the same day, a new section called "Gigs" was added, where low-cost and unpaid jobs can be posted free.
Source : Wikipedia