I spent the entire long weekend moving–what a way to spend my free time. During the process, I heavily used craigslist to do everything from selling furniture to looking for roommates. I was literally living on the site, checking various sections for new items every hour and subscribing to a dozen RSS feeds.

No matter what the new wave of design and style that web 2.0-ites love to tout–from the rounded corners to the smooth gradients–craigslist does it right with its simple-to-use-and-lightning-fast-to-download-party-like-it’s-1995 web design. In terms of a redesign, I think that anything busier than the one done by a panel at SXSW would be too much. And even then, I would still stick with the old style.

But, in terms of functionality, I have a few items for the craigslist feature wish list. And, here they are:

• Add the ability to delete items that you don’t find useful, thereby uncluttering the list of posts as you dwindle down the choices (you can always undelete them for yourself later).
• Picture thumbnails beside each listed item, if available.
• Ability to message the poster directly using craigslist (no more opening up your email program a million times).
• Ability to manage a set of responses to posts that you can easily message to posters (this would have helped during my apartment hunt).
• Remembering your location when you login and post a new classified.

A lot of these features can be pretty easy to code up. But, testing it within the craigslist infrastructure is probably what is stopping them from implementing too many new features at once. Hopefully though, they are working on at least some of these.

Do you have any suggestions for new craigslist features? Leave some suggestions in the comments.

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Categories - Development, Design |