Looking for someone to share your apartment on Craigslist can be a huge pain — so much so, in fact, that when my roommate moved out last year, I considered leaving the room empty. Thanks to some friend-of-friend connections, it all worked out in the end, but if it hadn’t, I probably I could’ve used a service like Livewith.us.
Perhaps the first thing to say about Livewith.us is that it’s not actually trying to compete with Craigslist. Instead, its creators expect users to continue posting and finding roommate listings on Craigslist. However, when the someone finds a listing that seems like a good fit, they can apply via Livewith.us. It’s there, in the latter part of the process — the part that’s largely conducted over email — that the site should be useful.
Both tenants (the people with an apartment who are looking for a room) and applicants have profiles on the site. They can use data imported from Facebook or they can be built from scratch. Basically, these profiles take the place of the copy-paste-bio-intro-email process and the awkward Facebook search that people might perform to learn more about future roommates. Livewith.us gives you the basic social context (including a list of mutual friends) that you’re looking for without showing you their drunk photos or whatever.
Plus, there’s no process of sending messages like, “Hey, we don’t know each other but can you friend me so I can see your profile?”
