There's a lowlife criminal using San Francisco's popular craigslist online classifieds to sell a used car, only to steal it back a few days later and sell it again.
The scam, while an extreme example, illustrates the fact that doing business through online classified listings can be risky: There's no guarantee you won't get ripped off.
A new online service, Tribe.net, hopes to address the problems of scammers and scoundrels by building a network of trusted users who do business with each other.
Tribe.net is backed by two newspaper companies -- Knight Ridder Digital and the Washington Post, which are eager to win back classified ad business from upstarts like craigslist.
According to Jupiter Research, traditional newspaper classifieds are declining dramatically -- between 10 percent and 15 percent annually -- while online classifieds are expected to grow from $1.6 billion to $3.3 billion by 2008.
Tribe.net is among several new much-hyped "social software" services used for networking online. Examples include Friendster, which focuses on dating, and LinkedIn, which deals with business networking.
Currently in beta, Tribe.net has been described as "Friendster meets craigslist." In the eight weeks that the San Francisco startup has been running, it has attracted upward of 18,000 users.
After filling out a detailed profile and joining a network, or tribe, of like-minded people, such as fans of TechTV or Burning Man, Tribe.net users are encouraged to engage in various transactions, from recommending dentists to selling cars.
Tribe.net's founder and CEO Mark Pincus said that building communities of people linked by a common interest means such transactions are a safer bet for users than those conducted through anonymous services like craigslist.
"It's a fundamentally better way of doing listings," he said. "The responses you get are going to be much more qualified and real than you get on craigslist."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60703,00.html
The scam, while an extreme example, illustrates the fact that doing business through online classified listings can be risky: There's no guarantee you won't get ripped off.
A new online service, Tribe.net, hopes to address the problems of scammers and scoundrels by building a network of trusted users who do business with each other.
Tribe.net is backed by two newspaper companies -- Knight Ridder Digital and the Washington Post, which are eager to win back classified ad business from upstarts like craigslist.
According to Jupiter Research, traditional newspaper classifieds are declining dramatically -- between 10 percent and 15 percent annually -- while online classifieds are expected to grow from $1.6 billion to $3.3 billion by 2008.
Tribe.net is among several new much-hyped "social software" services used for networking online. Examples include Friendster, which focuses on dating, and LinkedIn, which deals with business networking.
Currently in beta, Tribe.net has been described as "Friendster meets craigslist." In the eight weeks that the San Francisco startup has been running, it has attracted upward of 18,000 users.
After filling out a detailed profile and joining a network, or tribe, of like-minded people, such as fans of TechTV or Burning Man, Tribe.net users are encouraged to engage in various transactions, from recommending dentists to selling cars.
Tribe.net's founder and CEO Mark Pincus said that building communities of people linked by a common interest means such transactions are a safer bet for users than those conducted through anonymous services like craigslist.
"It's a fundamentally better way of doing listings," he said. "The responses you get are going to be much more qualified and real than you get on craigslist."
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,60703,00.html