Craigslist has enforced its local-focus policy by banning a tool that allowed for multi-city searching of the online classifieds website. A Craigslist systems administrator sent a letter to the provider of a search tool that allowed users to conduct nationwide searches of Craigslist listings. Jeff Atwood posted the letter he received on his site (http://www.codinghorror.com/craigslist), which says in part about his service, "...it goes against the basic intent of Craigslist to be a local tool."

Atwood's tool allows users to conduct job searches across all U.S. cities covered by Craigslist (http://www.craigslist.org/about/cities.html), which is a mostly free classifieds website (employers pay for job postings in some cities). Auction site eBay acquired a 25 percent stake in the classified site last year. Craigslist calls itself a "local community classifieds and forums - a place to find a job, housing, goods & services, a social life, advice, and just about anything else."

Craigslist users complained about the decision to block the tool on a Craigslist discussion board (http://forums.craigslist.org/?ID=29345737). Several posters said the decision will harm home workers and telecommuters because it will take too much time for them to search each city separately, and "companies who are looking for telecommuters are not allowed to repeatedly post the same job over multiple cities without taking a lot of time out of their lives."

Jeff Atwood told AuctionBytes that Craigslist frowns on anything that isn't local. "And I'm fine with that; it just doesn't make sense for people who are job hunting to relocate, or looking for telecommuting jobs. I feel these are legitimate uses. I recently relocated from North Carolina to California, so that was the impetus for developing the tool in the first place."

One frequent user of the multi-city search tool believes eBay forced Craigslist ban the tool. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark did not respond specifically to the banning of Atwood's tool, but told AuctionBytes, "We block usually because someone hits our servers really hard; and also, we've had overwhelming feedback to emphasize the local nature of our site."

A post on Website P2Pnet.net has quotes from Newmark and Craigslist President Jim Buckmaster (http://p2pnet.net/story/5375).

Whether or not eBay had a hand in Craiglist's decision, the situation highlights the problems of applying the principle of open-source to ecommerce marketplaces. eBay introduced a collaborative site last week to encourage open-source development, but the head of eBay's developer program candidly stated to AuctionBytes that he would remove any open-source projects that "violated Trust & Safety policies." eBay has used the "Trust & Safety" policy to kill third-party projects in the past.

Meanwhile, eBay has invested heavily in other online classifieds sites. Acquisitions include Mobile.de, a car classifieds site in Germany; and Rent.com, classifieds site in the apartment and rental housing industry in the U.S. eBay also acquired the Netherlands' Marktplaats.nl which owns classifieds sites in Germany, Canada, Spain and Turkey. And in March, eBay launched Kijiji and acquired Gumtree and LoQUo, key classifieds sites in the UK and Spain, respectively.

eBay plans to roll out RSS feeds of classifieds listings sometime after it rolls out feeds for eBay Store listings and marketing messages in the fourth quarter of 2005. eBay revealed the RSS plans at last week's developer conference, but did not get specific about the service.

Google seems tolerant of services that utilize its features, like Google Maps (http://www.housingmaps.com). But time will tell if even Google might feel differently about developers who play with its Froogle shopping service.

Marketplaces would do well to take ZDnet's Open Source blog's advice: "If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the open source kitchen" (http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=357).