One of my favorite things is to find Web sites that I like anyway and find that someone has done something external to improve them. I found a site that’s done that with Craigslist; it’s called ListPic. The URL is http://sfbay.listpic.com/, which is San Francisco, but ListPic works for whatever city you want to look at.

Here’s how it works: pick a city and then pick a category you want to review. For example, furniture. Instead of the usual text listing you’ll get a grid that shows listings with thumbnails of images broken out by date. Don’t find the pictures large enough? Use the slider at the top of the page to make the pictures larger. Click on an item to get a popup window with the text of the ad and contact information, along with options to get the ad’s permanent link or to e-mail the ad to a friend.

You can also filter the displayed items you get by keyword or by price (minimum and maximum.) For the cities where there’s a lot of traffic, like San Francisco, I recommend this highly.

I see only two real problems with ListPic. First off is that unless you do some narrow searching it can take some time to load the result pages (but I’d still rather do it that way than have to galumph through a bunch of individual ad pages.) The second thing is that sometimes the pictures don’t match the keyword. For example, I might be searching for futon but get some pictures of dresser drawers, beds, etc. I’m assuming this is happening when people have several items available for sale and might have pictures of only a couple.

There’s a very brief about page available at http://www.listpic.com/about.html. I really like this site; great stuff.