Craiglist:  Wired magazine has an article on Craigslist that is a great read.  It walks through the quirks of the website that often bears the brunt of blame for the decline in newspapers. 

Some fun tidbits:

• 30 employees
• a dearth of modern day "features" common to websites and no desire to build such features
• no PR, marketing, or legal departments
• beaucoup traffic
• highly unpredictable filtering system
• weird haiku messages

Interestingly, like all other companies it faces a constant battle against spam:  "the going price for a spam post on craigslist is about 50 cents, with large discounts for volume."  According to the CEO "[the spammers] are technically sophisticated people who take pride in their work, and when we knock them down they don't just decide to go find something else to do.  You could say we are breeding the perfect spammer."

Twitter:  Speaking of spam, someone passed along an article today about the prevalence of Twitter spam and how Twitter is supposedly making it "too easy to get spammed with off-color content, and too difficult to do something about it."  (Business Week)  This article didn't sit well with me for a variety of reasons...the headline is probably a good place to start: "get spammed" (??).  Most importantly, the "spam" described in the article are "followers" - people who "follow" you on Twitter in the hopes that you will click on links on their profile or their Twitter feed.  Now although I'm a lawyer, I tend to go pretty light on semantics.  That said, the situation described in the article doesn't qualify as spam in my opinion.  Spam is when something shows up in your in-box without you asking for it.  There may be spam on Twitter, but it's sure not the type described in the Business Week article.  (As a side note, both Facebook and MySpace have been able to convince judges that "wall spam" is subject to CAN-SPAM [link], but these decisions likely rest on a creative interpretation of the statute.)  In any event, even taking into account my typical apathy to spam (I find junk snail mail to be much more of a hassle) I don't find Twitter spam troubling.  At least the kind that is described in the article.  In fact, I don't think I've clicked on any links from any spam followers.  Maybe people who compulsively check their follower lists are more annoyed by this type of spam?  Who knows.  Obviously, Twitter spam is a huge drag for Twitter.  No one disputes this, and I'm sure they will start cracking down soon enough. But as a user I'm not complaining.  

Added:  this post ("Calling Bullshit on Twitter") on the Twitter spam problem is worth reading.  I don't really use Twitter search (and I think Twitter search is overrated as a source of information) so it's not a big deal to me, but I can see where people like Justin are coming from. 

[Image courtesy of freezelight on Flickr // Creative Commons]