iList, now based in San Francisco, originally found its footing here in San Diego, where the entrepreneurial minds of Dmitry Shapiro (Veoh) and Alex Bard (Goowy) started to envision the concept of a classifieds site that tied listings with an individual’s social graph. When yours truly introduced Bard to the team at Integral Impressions, things started to evolve in a new direction. Now with Chris Abad as acting CEO, iList is attempting to redefine the way people promote their classified listings.

As a member of iList, you can create a listing and promote that listing to your email contacts, your Twitter, Pownce, and FriendFeed followers, and your Facebook and MySpace friends all with a few check boxes. Abad claims that iList isn’t trying to be another social network, and instead is focusing on bringing members’ existing social networks to iList. With iList the “friend” model is pretty unique; when you integrate your various social accounts iList makes the leap and assumes that your friends elsewhere are your iList friends; they just connect the dots for you, eliminating the need for users to find and add friends.

To test out the service and promote my own event, I created a listing to get extras for a Jenn2.0 shoot. I added the basics, an image (I could have recorded a video too), and submitted it to iList. I then chose to promote the listing to Twitter and Facebook. One day later my listing has been seen by 261 people and promoted by 5 other iListers. Not bad. Here’s the problem though, I’m a little concerned that if I promote too many listings that I might jeopardize some of the trust I have with my social network, especially in terms of Facebook since notifications were sent to my entire network on Facebook (yikes).

The big elephant in the classifieds section being Craigslist (and the original tagline being “Craigslist is so 1995″), I asked Abad how iList was planning to take on the listings behemoth and compete for attention and traction. Abad’s response was that…

Craigslist does a great job at getting your listing in front of people geographically connected to you, but what they aren’t able to do is get your listing out to people who are socially close to you.

Abad went on to talk about the power of iList being the viral spread of a listing. They seem to realize and accept that iList is not positioned to compete with Craigslist in terms of quantity. The nature of the product is such that if people actually use iList and promote their listings, then iList will be able to virally spread the listing and their marketing message at the same time—with the ultimate goal being a quick win for both the lister and the company.

To Watch or Not

iList is working with $1.5 million in Series A funding from DFJ and primarily focusing on getting traction. Once they show the idea works then they plan to scale iList and search for more funds. Abad is confident that with traction, iList will be a startup that stays afloat during the financial downturn, especially given the inherent monetization opportunities of a classifieds site. My personal take is that iList needs to find a way to disrupt the current way of thinking. Even web savvy types like myself immediately think of Craigslist when the need to sell something or find something arises. If iList can interject themselves into this formula they might have a fighting chance.

What are your thoughts about iList? Have you used the service? Have you promoted a friend’s listing? What do you think?