Whether you are on the side of PadMapper, or not, I'm glad to see that Craigslist is finally starting to take some innovation seriously. A competitor coming out to show them that they can do something different, causing them to do something different, is a win for everyone, besides PadMapper.
That being said, it should be pointed out the original link[1] contains quite a bit more information than this post.
* Craiglist looks like they will be hosting their own maps via OpenStreetMap[2].
* There are already examples[3] out in the wild.
Beyond this, it also appears that Craglist has even setup feedback[4] for their maps.
I'm not chalking this one up as a win. This is Craigslist doing the bare minimum, just like they did when they developed mobile/tablet versions of the site. They build half-features that ultimately aren't that useful, but are enough to quell the angry masses. And given that embedding a map should be fairly simple, I'm surprised that they're having trouble with it:
Hear hear. This is a +1 for padmapper, even though they might have technically lost the war.
If there's one thing that's been constant over the last 5 or so years, it's that craigslist doesn't change. They don't add a lot of features or functionality, and displaying maps is like scifi tech to them.
It's obviously a complex situation, but this could be viewed as a determined individual causing a behemoth to move. Sometimes you can effect change without making millions of dollars.
Nope! I respectfully disagree. It's a win for current craigslist users and craigslist, but it's a loss for the ecosystem as a whole and everyone in the future besides craigslist.
Imagine if email was a centralized system instead of a protocol. It would not be good for users in the long run, even if the most righteous person ever was in charge of it (btw Craig Newmark seems like a pretty cool guy). The temptation for the email company to abuse its position would be too great ("Don't like our company? OK, don't use email!"). Even if the company wasn't abusing users (this is the where we currently are with craigslist) it will still always be glacially slow to innovate compared to a decentralized system like actual email.
It actually would have been great if craigslist had stopped innovating entirely and gotten replaced. Now we're back where we started.
Totally! Each company should work in it's own best interest. I'm only pointing out that the interests of craigslist are neither the interests of developers nor the general public.
Exactly, this is not helpful at all. I easily. can put the address into Google maps and see where this listing is located. The real value would be the ability to search in a specific region or neighborhood.
It solves about 50% of the problem for me: the biggest frustration for me is not being able to quickly glance at a listing to see where it is. If I could open 20 Craigslist listings in 20 tabs and see a map in each, that mostly takes care of it for me.
It would be far better if that landing page were either a search page or listings-posting page. Most likely search (that's going to be most of your interest) with a link (or form) for posting.
I looked at it for 15 seconds (hey, I'm at my day job), couldn't figure it out, and left.
PadMapper and Craigslist both have a far better usability proposition.
Fivepad isn't a listings site, it's a bookmarking app. You plug in the URLs for the listings you find on other sites and it shows you them on a map and helps you coordinate with roommates.
Oh, I forgot to mention the bookmarklet. There's a bookmarklet. I see where you're coming from, though, but we've all seen what CL does to people who try to use their data. I believe Fivepad lives within the TOS boundaries, since it's not doing generalized scraping.
Yeah. I suppose if I was maintaining a list of URLs and could copy/paste them in bulk it might be OK. In which case I'd probably write my own scraper to search CL based on my own criteria and dump the raw links to plug in (a little lynxs or wget + awk).
CLMapper does the cool job though of showing all of a current page's results on a single map. Which, assuming the underlying geographic data are reliable, is helpful.
This article is pretty off. This is not the "feature" of PadMapper. PadMapper made it easy to locate aggregate postings on Craigslist, along with the ability to filter those postings by attributes. Additionally, they provide some auxiliary information, such as pricing vs median pricing, WalkScore, etc. Craigslist just added an embedded map on the page - something that wasn't already too far away with a click to "google map".
If I were PadMapper, I'd try as quickly as possible to mock up their previous functionality as a Firefox/Chrome addon, which would just manually scrape craigslist from within your browser.
Apartment hunting is such a pain, I think a lot of folk would actually be willing to install addons if it made it easier.
Quite honestly, a lawsuit is a waste of time. All Craigslist ever had to do to beat Padmapper was to add a search results map feature to their own product.
That's pretty much a hallmark of an evil company, is it not? (At the extreme end you have patent trolls who have nothing but patents and lawyers.)
Whatever one's opinion of Padmapper and their legal/moral standing is, one has to admit that Craiglist's actions are completely contrary to the image of a non-evil company that they try to cultivate.
It seems perverted that you're accusing the company whose data is being stolen and re-purposed against their express wishes and terms of services is the 'evil' one in this scenario. Just because someone uses the law and lawyers to get what they want doesn't make them inherently evil. In fact, it seems pretty justified in this case.
Who says it's Craigslist's data? Last I checked the general public generates this data without compensation from Craigslist. Both legally and morally, it is their data.
This would be like the USPS claiming my mail is actually theirs. They provide a value-added service, but that grants neither legal nor moral claim over my information.
> " In fact, it seems pretty justified in this case."
Encourage third-party developers to scrape the site and use your data, claiming that your company is only concerned about undue server load.
Wait until third-party developer develops something that might actually be worth something. Allow third-party developer to gain traction and evangelize this product concept to the world.
Use legal force to shut down third-party developer and re-implement his product yourself.
... What part of that strikes you sas "pretty justified"?
"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable, unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers), worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting, collection or aggregation of content that you post)."
By posting, you're agreeing they can do whatever they want with your data and prohibit others from taking it from their site. Morally and legally, I think they are in the clear. There is no moral right to be able to scrape someone else's site and use their data because you want to.
I don't think they encourage people to scrape their data at all. They have a long history of blocking people and stopping people from doing exactly that.
Their data, their rules. It's not like Twitter where they pretended to be developer friendly and screwed over everyone. Craigslist was NEVER developer friendly. They were pretty upfront about it. PadMapper knew what they were getting into, even acknowledged they were in the wrong, and continued to do what they were doing anyways. How Craigslist gets portrayed as the bad guy is shocking to me.
> If you have more bandwidth on the legal side of your company for work than your development side, then a lawsuit might make sense.
If you have more bandwidth on the legal side of your company for work than your development side, then your company is getting closer to being undead like SCO or Kodak. In this situation, it's high time to do something about that.
Craigslist isn't suing PadMapper for adding maps, it's suing because it sues everyone who republishes CL data (with the exception of generic search engines). CL's real target is 3Taps, which is where PM gets its data. If CL loses the lawsuit, the most valuable piece for developers remaining will be CL images. 3Taps' API includes links to those images, as well as much other useful data, but CL is never going to let developers hotlink to the pictures it hosts. (One could launder those image links through a 3rd party service, but the scope is too large to be undetectable, besides it introduces an ethical issue.) The larger play here, which may in time overtake CL itself, is 3Taps' plan to open the classifieds space in a big way.
I'm sure this has been answered before, but why does it matter to Craigslist if it's data is being used elsewhere and is clearly marked as Craigslist data?
Say Craigslist is paid for real estate listings: they already have the money, and they don't make any additional money off of advertising, so why does it matter where someone accesses that information?
I'm genuinely curious why this isn't similar to Twitter, for instance, allowing developers to show tweets in their own applications. Except in this case, people are paying to "tweet" (post real estate listings). Also, for this question, I'm ignoring Twitter's recent policy changes.
I suspect I'm being naive here, and the issue may be that they just really don't want other people profiting from their data, but I guess I just don't get it.
The problem is that if another site has the same listings as Craigslist and provides a better user experience, people looking to rent an apartment will start visiting that site instead of Craigslist. Over time, people looking to list apartments that want an audience of renters would start listing on that site directly instead of Craigslist, since that is now the best place to find renters.
Ah, so in that case it would literally come down to not wanting to have to innovate. If they truly thought that people preferred to have it the way it is, you'd think that they wouldn't be afraid of this.
Good start, however Craigslist needs to do a lot more than adding maps. For example, real estate listings need to have transportation options. Part of the reason why we started http://www.realtywarp.com is because renters need more information about a given neighborhood before visiting a listing. Renters tend to have a preference for a specific square or metro. That said, they will not be visiting a listing if they do not have that information immediately available.
Here is an example of what craigslist could be doing with maps and transportation options:
I wonder how useful a map really would be since craigslist already provides a neighborhood filter on the apartment search. My experience when looking for an ideal apartment is that there normally aren't that many results that fit all your desired criteria so you have to relax your criteria and expand your search into adjacent neighborhoods. You're probably not going to find the perfect apartment in the exact spot on the map that you want.
I find that while a neighborhood filter gets the job done, its usability isn't great, for a number of reasons:
* You have to roughly know the boundaries of all the neighborhoods for the list of names to be useful
* A one-dimensional arrangement of names doesn't correspond well to the 2D relationships you probably care about.
* Many neighborhoods don't map well to regions I care about. I often find myself selecting Bernal Heights, Mission District, and Noe Valley to capture the idea of "the area around 24th and Valencia", for example.
The best outcome for users is being able to search one site listing all possible ads from many sources. Unless craigslist starts bringing in others results, and I'm not saying they should, it's still less useful for apartments than padmapper.
I really don't see any win for craigslist here, other than making their site a little bit less horrible for this particular function.
I still think a partnership would have been the best choice for Craigslist versus suing PadMapper and start from scratch...PadMapper does have an expertise and data. Craigslist could have used that precious talent and data to create a better product....
It seems like you are overvaluing the 'expertise' required to do what PadMapper did.
It makes perfect sense for Craigslist to want to do this entirely in-house, because the barrier to feature parity with a site like PadMapper isn't very high. And now PadMapper can't pull the rug out from under Craigslist and win over the userbase.
you are undervaluing the data you and I don't see.... Last time I check Craigslist isn't their only source....I understand why Craigslist did it but I still think Craigslist would have been better with padMapper...
That being said, it should be pointed out the original link[1] contains quite a bit more information than this post.
* Craiglist looks like they will be hosting their own maps via OpenStreetMap[2].
* There are already examples[3] out in the wild.
Beyond this, it also appears that Craglist has even setup feedback[4] for their maps.
[1] - http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/craigslist-maps...
[2] - https://twitter.com/openstreetmap/status/237877987507322880
[3] - http://portland.craigslist.org/clk/apa/3207930288.html
[4] - https://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=3132