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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#121

Post by kika »

Stefan_H wrote: post #46
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.

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

What a silly analogy. If I have a car and you steal it from me, you now have a car and I don't. What PadMapper does is it takes a picture of my car and shows/sells it to people. Analogies require handling with care :-)

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#122

Post by iamwil »

makmanalp wrote: post #32

I've used padmapper twice to get an apartment so far, and It's great! I've loved the fact that it's constantly improving and has exactly the features I need: Walkscore, bookmarking, map, proper filters. It's strictly better. To the author: I would have paid for this. It sucks that this waas mainly an interface to craigslist, and now they're gone. I hope this gets enough critical mass that eventually so that the unusa…

Just a clarification, padmapper will continue to exist with listings from a lot of other places. It will just no longer have Craigslist listings, unless you help send an email to Craig and Jim.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#124

Post by J3L2404 »

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.

What does the usability of their product have to do with it? It's their product. I know, "everything is free on the Internet, man".

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#125

Post by bermanoid »

mtrimpe wrote: post #79
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.

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://marktplaat…

Yup, there's a catch-22 here: when your site has shitty usability but is the only source of information, people hit more pages and spend more time there. When you fix your UI mistakes, they're in and out quicker because they actually get what they need efficiently. Because you're optimizing for engagement by measuring time on site or something like that, you end up making sure never to make your site easy to use.

This is not a recipe for success. It's a symptom of measuring the wrong metric, especially when you have a near monopoly on a market due to network effects. If this is really why Craigslist is not improving their UI, they need to hire some analysts that actually know WTF they're doing.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#126

Post by product50 »

If I were at Craigslist, I would strongly look at commercializing their listings. By that I mean charging a fixed amount (say $5) for every 1000 results sent to the requester (such as Padmapper). That ways Craigslist gets to keep the revenue while other companies can innovate on top of the massive data which Craigslist has.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#127

Post by marquis »

alister wrote: post #111
mtrimpe wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://marktplaat…

Despite the very basic UI, the Dutch version of Craigslist seems to be doing well based on the hundreds of apartment listings in, for example, Amsterdam: http://amsterdam.craigslist.org/apa/ But if I might inject an opposing data point, nobody seems to use the Brazilian version of Craigslist. Check out Sao Paulo: http://saopaulo.craigslist.org/apa/ Can you believe that there are just 5 apartment listings for a metrop…

There are various examples of Craiglist just simply not working in various countries. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that Craigslist really only had a monopoly in the U.S. Brazil uses olx (I think?), Argentina and Mexico among other Latin American countries use mercadolibre where Craigslist is more for baiting foreigners with higher rent prices and international shared accomodation. Australia has gumtree, New Zealand has trademe (and they both use Seek for jobs) and I would use marktplaats in the Netherlands as mentioned above. I forget the one for Spain. The list goes on..

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#128

Post by jaredsohn »

robmaceachern wrote: post #60

Wow this is really surprising, especially after reading Craig Newmark's answer on Quora just the other day to the question "Why hasn't anyone built any products on top of Craigslist data?". His response: "Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple." http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-...

To clarify for everyone, while the parent read the answer a few days ago, Craig wrote this response in 2010.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#129

Post by trotsky »

MartinCron wrote: post #77
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.

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".

Content not available for licensing is a justification for infringement? That doesn't ring true at all for me - exclusive content is often much more valuable to a business than content that's licensed. I doubt anyone would think that goldman sachs coverage being distributed by morgan stanley would fit under some "no harm, no foul" ethos even if Morgan significantly improved on the layout of the pages.
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