I've always wanted to break into CL's space due to their utter disregard for the garden of web APIs growing up around them. They could be doing so much more with their service for the community, and I don't mean going the big time corporate route obsessed with short-term revenue.

There have been many CL clones(kijiji), but none gained enough eyeballs to make an interoperating API work. I suspect these attempts failed because they didn't pay attention to the community and instead acted liked closed corporations right out the starting gate. I thought the CL killer would appear on Facebook, but that hasn't happened because of totally different dynamics in Facebook's ecosystem.

Actually, I'm surprised that I haven't seen someone one here posting a hacked up API wrapper around Craigslist as a mini-startup.

Sorely needed. I can imagine pretty amazing mashups that revolved around your local community if Craigslist had an API. I'd imagine there would be a much bigger developer community than Twitter's because of the usefulness of their data and how important they are to local businesses