Craigslist has a lot going for it: a huge community, thousands of listings, and incredible popularity. At the same time, it's not very pretty, and numerous competing services have sprung up to challenge it. Now Microsoft is getting into the game with Windows Live Expo, a service that allows you to search and browse items for sale, from CDs to condominiums. You can sign up using your Windows Live account and post your own items, customize the view for your region and categories that interest you, and even browse the personals if you're looking for love.
Some of the services at Windows Live Expo hook into other services that Microsoft already offers, either through the MSN network or the Windows Live network. The personal ads, for example, are hosted at Match.com. Microsoft also appears to have partnered with a number of companies to get dedicated--and perhaps exclusive-- listings for apartments for rent, available real estate, and consumer electronics for sale. Windows Live Expo even has job listings, pulled from services such as CareerBuilder and other companies looking for talent.
Windows Live Expo is attractive and well laid out, and the categories are available either at a glance or with a single click. You can sign in to customize the view to your region, or choose a category first and narrow the search results to what's in your area. The site keeps track of the items that you browse so you can return to them easily. Just like Craigslist, Windows Live Expo allows you to reply to a listing by emailing the poster, and to comment on the posting to get more information or share your thoughts.
I do like that Windows Live Expo takes some of the chatter out of Craigslist by forcing you to comment or reply, to communicate with the original poster, instead of using entire posts at the service as chat threads. At the same time, as the community grows and people have more to talk about, the comments may well become just as unwieldy.
Each listing includes basic information, and the poster can also include relevant photographs and important details. If the post is an item for sale, for example, you'll see a description of the item and how much it's selling for, and you might even get driving directions or an MSN map with the location plotted on it, as well as what (if any) shipping options are available. The listings are highly customizable, so regardless of whether you're posting a job or trying to sell an MP3 player, you can include as much or as little information as you like.
Signing up for a Windows Live account is free, and once you have one, you can post at Windows Live Expo as much as you like. If you want to make your listings public, you can opt to share them with the world--or you can limit the listing to "communities," or groups of users at Expo who have common interests. You can browse the communities that Microsoft has already set up at the site or create your own.
The built-in communities and social aspects of the service are significant. Not only can you list products and services and go shopping, get in touch with others, and even look for a job: Expo also integrates with Windows Live Messenger and PayPal, so you can add buddies, create individual profiles, and be alerted when people send you messages or update your communities. You can set up a community just for your neighborhood or friends and post items for sale that are only viewable by those people, or you can use a community as a closed discussion group, for example.
Windows Live Expo looks good and does a lot more than a classified service. Since you need a Windows Live account to use it, Microsoft is betting on the people who already use Microsoft services such as Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Local to take advantage of it. The real key to Expo's success is how quickly people adopt it and whether anyone is really looking for an alternative to the already popular Craigslist. Expo looks like it could be a great contender, but it just might be too late to the game.
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