Passive Shopping on CraigsList

This week I bought a bike on CraigsList. It was an incredibly easy thing to do because of RSS (if you don't know what RSS is, click through to this great explanation).

Here's how I bought my bike:

1. I decided I might be interested in buying a new bike at the right price.
2. I did a search under the "bikes"  category on CraigsList for "60cm." ("60cm" is the bike size my lanky frame requires).
3. There were a few results, but nothing of particular interest. Thankfully, CraigsList provides an RSS feed for this specific search. I copied the RSS feed, (provided in the lower right corner of the search results screen), and then loaded it into my feedreader. From that moment on, anytime a bike with "60cm" in the description was posted on Craigslist, my feedreader pinged me.
4. So I went on with my life, and every few days or so a 60cm bike showed up in my feedreader.
5. The above 60cm bike showed up this week, I called the buyer, and arranged to buy it for a bargain price.

Traditionally, to get this kind of deal I would have had to scour the classifieds at least daily, and then race other  potential  buyers  to close the deal. Now, I use RSS and as soon as a posting is made, I get a ping. This is how I bought my office whiteboard, my car, and could very well be how I buy a house. I love when technology makes a normally labor intensive task a breeze.

Comments

[Ashley]

That was a really cool youtube description. What a great idea--I'm going to sign up for google reader.
I almost couldn't find your blog since the url changed, but was glad to know it's still here.
Hope everything is going well--your girls are so cute!