I know I haven't written in a while and the summer (and half the fall for that matter) got away from me. I notice though that my .net guru buddy hasn't written all summer either though, so I feel better.
I said that I would check out some more Listing Posting sites a while back, so I checked out oodle this morning. Here's what I found. It looks like they have an affiliation with Lycos so you can post to both places, but as far as I could tell, it looks like you have to enter the posting in both places also. The software is similar but not identical. The main problem I saw with oodle was that, once I registered it assumed that I was the contact for the listing, and wanted to use my email as the addrss to reply to. Something craigslist allowed for along time ago was no reply address, and you specify the contact info in the classified. The nearest city I could post too was Detroit, which is at least 75 miles from my folks real estate area in Southern Michigan. Backpage still has this downfall also, but Craigslist has added Ann Arbor, and more recently Jackson, which is very close. Also oodle didn't allow me to specify a half bath, I didn't like having to select "real Estate" twice in the screen clicking process. It did let me specify a website address for the listing, but then it didn't hyperlink it for me. They could hyperlink it with a nofollow. I might post more to oodle in the future but it wouldn't be my first choice.
2 comments:
Hi Dave,
Great post, and thanks for the feedback! I hope that I can help to answer some of the questions that arose during your experience with Oodle.
Oodle does indeed have a partnership with Lycos, as well as over 200 other content partners – so when you post on Oodle, your listing is spread throughout the network and given exposure to millions upon millions of viewers.
In terms of assigning a no-reply email, whatever email address you supply does not show up on your post; users will contact you through a form that we provide, so your email address is safe and sound. As for specifying half baths, I think that is a great suggestion, and hopefully we can implement it in the future.
I understand the frustration with not being able to post a listing hyper-locally, but Oodle also has a Jackson, MI area (http://jacksonmi.oodle.com/), so Detroit shouldn't be the closest area you can post to.
Finally, in response to the problem with specifying a website address, the address you listed is the address that we send users to when they click on your link. So instead of having a link in the listings for users to click on (like what Craigslist does), a user gets taken directly to your site when they click on your listing.
I hope this helps explain some of the issues you were having, and thanks again for the feedback.
Cheers,
Matt Dearborn
Communications Associate, Oodle
matt@corp.oodle.com
650.401.7200x122
Matt,
I checked again and I'm sorry. Your right, oodle does have the ability to select Jackson, MI. I think I just must have selected Detroit on the main page, but if you select the se all "282 regions" link, I do see Jackson, MI in there.
As far as my email being kept private, thats not what I meant. What I mean is that I created a user account for me, but I will put in listings for different agents my folks office, and would rather replies went to the office and not me. I don't, however want to use any of the agents email addresses for the account. I'd like to be able to specify the contact info for a particular listing on a per listing basis without having 6 oodle accounts. It's not a real big deal.
As far as the hyperlink I'm still not sure what you mean because It has a field where I can specify an address, but when I look at the listing - http://jacksonmi.oodle.com/view/642714170?k=bb31decaa9213ef1 it's not hyper. I guess I'm not seeing where the link is used to take users to the page on my folks site. I believe you that its there, and I'm probably just not seeing the particular oodle page that utilizes it. I just thought it was odd that it wasn't hyper in the listing itself.
Also, let me know if you have an xml input feature for loading listings.
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