Craiglist’s Dirty Little Secret

Type the words “craigslist” and “prostitution” into Google’s News Search and you’ll get dozens of results from just this month. The Naperville Sun of Illinois quotes a police official saying that sites like “Craigslist might be at the root of a recent surge in prostitution at Naperville hotels and motels.” In New York, ABC writes that prostitutes use Craigslist to peddle their services and even include $25 discount coupons. In a large prostitution sting in Seattle, the Seattle Times reports that Craigslist “is a vehicle for promoting prostitution” and describes a “complete subculture” that exists on the web site (complete with pet names!).

Of course, you’ve probably seen or heard of this problem yourself. Craigslist is a very popular site and this could be just a small minority of users, right? Compete.com, a web site that tracks Internet traffic, recently published a startling blog post about Craigslist. In every single one of the eight major cities studied, more visitors came to Craigslist for Erotic Services than any other category. Stephen Bagg writes that “erotic services consistently garners .. almost always twice as many [visitors] as the next ranking category.” Not far behind? The equally risqué Casual Encounters category, where people seek sexual encounters with others.

Now it must be noted that we at Metromole are far from moralists. The last thing we want to do is tell people how to live their lives (we’ve got plenty of people trying to do that already). However, illegal activity has the tendency to become a virus, inviting more illegal activity, scams and thieves. And these same scams and thieves are popping up on Craigslist on a daily basis as a kind of no holes barred free for all. It seems inevitable that as the gap widens between erotic services and other illegal activity and just about everything else, Craigslist will soon become too congested with sex to coherently offer anything else.

Metromole understands the potential for smut to taint and ultimately infect an online classifieds site. That is why we strictly prohibit salacious postings. They diminish trust amongst users. If you’re looking for an antique oak desk, Metromole is the place for you. So while we prefer to do all our buying and selling on Metromole, when lunch time approaches you may see us scanning Craigslist for a no strings attached sex romp with … wait, we’ll save that for the experts.

The Idea Behind Metromole

After three months of non stop development and coding, and countless cans of Coke and sleepless nights, Metromole has finally been opened up to the public.

The idea behind Metromole is simple. We need a better way of posting classified ads. Existing services like Craigslist or Kijiji are threadbare when it comes to features and specialized services such as Cars.com or Apartments.com or Match.com all charge either posters or users every time. In an Internet where we can get so many feature rich applications for free .. why can’t we post detailed classifieds for free?

Metromole never charges anyone to post or to reply to ads, and we never will. We plan to make revenue through a small number of posts who choose to upgrade their ads to Featured Ads, or to people who choose to verify their accounts. Beyond that, please enjoy Metromole as the best free feature rich classified ads application on the Internet!

My Favorite Technology Blogs

Welcome to the Metromole blog. As I was creating this blog on WordPress, WordPress proudly informed me that its members had started over 44,000 blogs … today!! I have no idea if that is an even feasible figure, as it is not even 10am in New York. Anyway, in the midst of these 44,000 new blogs today, and over 2m total (and this only on WordPress), thanks for reading this one.

In this first post, I’d like to pay tribute to the fantastic blogs that have so graciously kept me and millions of others abreast in the latest developments in the web startup arena. If you’re interested in the industry, I suggest you bookmark these sites and subscribe to their feeds.

Techcrunch. The latest news about startups, with around 5 or 6 daily posts, and definitely the quickest to press. Honestly, Techcrunch may deserve this post all to themselves.

Compete. First, I love their tagline … “Track your rivals. Then eat their lunch.” Their site has some very interesting articles on trends in Internet traffic. I actually prefer data from Quantcast or Alexa, but insights on Compete about different Internet niches is very interesting indeed.

GigaOM. This web site focuses on some interesting issues in the latest web and computing technologies with a business twist. It is closely associated with a couple both blogs focusing on a variety issues such as cleantech and the like.

ReadWriteWeb. I love the diversity of the posts listed on this site. Check out this recent article, for example.

VentureBeat. As is evident in the name, this focuses on VC activity.

Welcome to the Metromole Blog

Posting to commence shortly. Bookmark please.