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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#71

Post by jamiequint »

markerdmann wrote: post #64
jamiequint wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magic recipe that keeps people coming back is that Craigslist has a large network. I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist.

Don't discount the speed. Every Craigslist page loads and renders very quickly. The simple, text-only UI helps keep it fast, and that matters.

While the pageload speed may be faster the total speed to find what I'm looking for is drastically slower due to the fact that the interface sucks.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#72

Post by ericd »

fleitz wrote: post #33

Kudos to CL for standing up for user privacy. When I use CL it's with consideration of their TOS which bans these practices. When padmapper copies the data they violate my privacy, my copyright, and the agreement between myself and craigslist as outlined in the TOS. What padmapper is doing is a violation of many data privacy laws like PIPEDA, EUDPD, and various copyright acts. If padmapper wants the data why don't th…

PadMapper team here, I don't show your copyrighted text, I link to your posts an provide a preview of the stats. Just a clarification.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#73

Post by drivingmenuts »

ghshephard wrote: post #36
kenrikm wrote: post #11

Craigslist is in major need of disruption. Actually apartment finding in general sucks I can't think of a single goto place to look for apartments other then Craigslist and that just proves point #1!

I guess a lot depends on where you live - Craigslist in the Bay area is like magic for finding apartments, or a room to rent. The Bay Area has a very advanced craigslist option, where you can sort not only by geographic area (Peninsula), you can even zoom down to a particular city. Add filtering by price and find a place to live in the Bay area has always (Since 2003) been painless for me - particularly as I don't dr…

It's hell here in Austin. The listings are so polluted with realtors, you can't find anything that's not a giant complex.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#75

Post by rhizome »

robrenaud wrote: post #48
fleitz wrote: post #33

Kudos to CL for standing up for user privacy. When I use CL it's with consideration of their TOS which bans these practices. When padmapper copies the data they violate my privacy, my copyright, and the agreement between myself and craigslist as outlined in the TOS. What padmapper is doing is a violation of many data privacy laws like PIPEDA, EUDPD, and various copyright acts. If padmapper wants the data why don't th…

This isn't making a permanent record of casual encounters. It's putting apartment listings on a map. People listing apartments tend to want it to be widely known.

So since it doesn't cross your arbitrary line of bigotry their concerns are worthless.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#76

Post by eshvk »

juiceandjuice wrote: post #58
ghshephard wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess a lot depends on where you live - Craigslist in the Bay area is like magic for finding apartments, or a room to rent. The Bay Area has a very advanced craigslist option, where you can sort not only by geographic area (Peninsula), you can even zoom down to a particular city. Add filtering by price and find a place to live in the Bay area has always (Since 2003) been painless for me - particularly as I don't dr…

Yeah but that still sucks, because people rarely know which neighborhood they are in. With padmapper, I could see exactly what was where and not have to worry about somebody thinking excelsior is somehow the mission, and the price per room/cats and dogs/walk score/etc... extras are amazing and integrated, especially if you don't know an area. I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyon…

>> Yeah but that still sucks, because people rarely know which neighborhood they are in.

"rarely" is a tough word. I have found the city to be pretty well demarcated unless you are talking about people confused about minor issues such as what counts as Lower Haight and what counts as Upper Haight.

>> I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.

I used Padmapper as a newbie to the city but quickly found that the latency between postings on CL and the corresponding crawled updates on Padmapper were so high that the postings would have already been hit by a few dozen responses by the time I got it and in a hyper-competitive housing market like SF, this made all the difference.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#77

Post by MartinCron »

binaryorganic wrote: post #37
jamiequint wrote: post #29

This is just offensive. It would be one thing if Craigslist was doing their best to satisfy their customers and they wanted to shut down others who were scraping their site and leeching off their business. However, Craigslist puts absolutely no effort into making their product usable. The continued existence of Craigslist is just a testimony to the enormous strength of network effect lock in.

Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.

Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it?

Craigslist is unwilling to let Padmapper buy a license to use their content. This isn't as black and white as "stealing content".

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#79

Post by mtrimpe »

jamiequint wrote: post #50
binaryorganic wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.

The magic recipe that keeps people coming back is that Craigslist has a large network. I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist.

Their magic recipe is that an amazing amount of non-technical people have figured out how to work with the site.

The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament.

They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement.

It's almost surreal to look at their site (http://marktplaats.nl) and realize that there's tons of highly talented people behind it.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#80

Post by dr42 »

grantjgordon wrote: post #61
Stefan_H wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your argument is "Since they are not doing everything they can with their content, I can steal it"?

It's hard for me to see this as stealing content since: 1) Padmapper shows the original craigslist page when you click through to the details page. 2) Padmapper doesn't seem to be monetizing itself in any obvious way, at least not directly through ads on content. 3) Craigslist doesn't monetize its content through ads, anyway. Essentially all it offers is a wrapper that lowers the friction to discovery. You know, like…

The difference is that the search engines aggregate from the whole web, PadMapper was just appropriating content from CL, which is against their TOS. It's very clearly spelled out.

All the other companies that have tried have also been told to C&D. If you don't like it, start your own network...

From http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use

"Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing, iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited."

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