If you find yourself hunting and pecking through Craigslist, scouring multiple locations, and checking again every fifteen minutes, you tend to get frustrated. That’s what happened to Ian Drake, an IT consultant and web entrepreneur who travels all over New England, so he decided to do something about it.
“About four years ago I started a NotifyWire.com to alert people via email and SMS when out of stock items like the Xbox360, PS3, and Wii where in stock at online retailers” Ian started to explain. “After the fever for these products died down, I wasn’t sure what to do with NotifyWire until I started frequenting Craigslist and realized the same type of problem existed.”
That’s when he decided to re-launch NotifyWire.com as service to monitor Craigslist for people just like him. Now in its third version, the software has grown from just a monitoring service to a complete toolset for discriminating Craigslist buyers.
Currently, Ian is on the hunt for a vintage surfboard and shared a screenshot to show how simple NotifyWire is to create searches with multiple locations and categories.
“There were three things I hated about Craigslist“, Ian continued, “the inefficiency of searching and re-searching multiple locations and categories, being the second person to respond to an ad, and scammers and spammers“.
NotifyWire solved the first two problems by using a unique peer 2 peer technology for monitoring Craigslist. Unlike other Craigslist monitoring software, NotifyWire’s p2p software doesn’t require the user’s computer to be running, which is great for laptop users.
“When your computer is off, NotifyWire uses other connected computers to run your search. The peer 2 peer aspect of NotifyWire allows us to monitor more of Craigslist at a higher frequency than anyone else.” In fact, Ian says the seller is often shocked at how fast he responds to their ad.
Another feature Ian really likes is the ability to view search results as image thumbnails.
A new feature in version 3.0 to combat scammers and spammers is the ability to reply to ads using NotifyWire as an intermediary. This not only hides your email address from spammers, but it allows NotifyWire to geo-locate the seller based on their IP address.
“When a seller replies to your message on NotifyWire.com, we forward the message with the city, state, country, and ISP the seller used to connect to the Internet.” This feature makes it easy to spot foreign scammers a mile away.
You can download NotifyWire at http://www.notifywire.com/download/. The free version is limited to searching five locations at once and you can only save one search, however there is no time limit to the trial. A pro version can be purchased for 29.95/yr which allows you to search and monitor up to 500 locations and save up to 50 searches.
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