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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#141

Post by mwhite »

icebraining wrote: post #92
mwhite wrote: post #78

Take them to court. I will donate to your legal fund.

On what grounds, exactly? They have every right to deny you access to theirs servers.

They have every right to implement technical barriers to scraping. Whether they can invoke the law to establish a legal barrier to re-publishing their proprietary-but-public facts -- not even the apartment summary text, just extracted metadata -- is not at all clear. When an auction aggregator was sued by eBay for doing something similar, the judgment in eBay's favor rested on the fact that the aggregator was posing a real undue technical burden, not the inherent fact that they were scraping.[1] Since I assume Padmapper does intelligent scraping, they might have a fairly good case.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#144

Post by jamiequint »

moreorless wrote: post #99
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.

> 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. So when can we expect to see your show HN: Craiglist done right?

Building the right interface is simple. The real problem of building any marketplace is solving the chicken/egg problem of having a lot of buyers and sellers.

Craigslist does not avoid disruption because it has the best product, it avoids disruption because it has a huge marketplace with a lot of buyers and sellers.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#145

Post by pbreit »

smalter wrote: post #134

I'm pretty sure that Craigslist disruption is coming, and it's going to be AirBnB. I'm not too worried. What craigslist is doing (ie, sucking) isn't sustainable.

Hah, people have been saying that for a decade. What people fail to realize is that Craigslist is ultra successful because of what it does, not despite.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#146

Post by AceJohnny2 »

Here's the email I sent to Craigslist. I tried to use the following template: intro (what are we talking about), how padmapper is good for craigslist, why I care about padmapper, course of action.

Feel free to reuse it.

----

Hi Jim and Craig,

I learned today that Craigslist has sent a Cease and Desist to padmapper.com. Padmapper provides a service to visualize on a map rental listings from sources like Craigslist.

Real estate is all about location, and let's be frank, Craigslist's location-based search sucks. Padmapper helps the searcher easily see where real estate is located. It turns a grueling search into a breeze. It adds great value to Craigslist's listings without competing with Craigslist's business.

Padmapper, along with Craigslist, were essential in helping me find my current home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Without Padmapper, I wouldn't have used Craigslist in my search.

I'm sure you can find a mutually beneficial deal with Padmapper, instead of shutting them out entirely.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#147

Post by pbreit »

I propose that Craigslist has been ultra successful because of its actions, not despite. I think it's success is due both directly to how it has built and operated the site as well as due to the overall mentality that fends off all the lame ideas from the armchair product designers.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#149

Post by philmcc »

Solution/Question:

Could the padmapper guy just make an application, which he sells for $10-$15, with the same functionality, except all the "scraping" happens from the user's computer or browser?

And if this violates the TOS, assuming I can sell a browser which only visits Craigslist -- then where is the line where a browser does too much "formatting" and becomes a TOS violation?

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#150

Post by mappu »

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.

Other good examples of these content-over-form sites are 2ch.net in japan, and 4chan for the western world. (4chan recently updated its HTML for the first time in something like eight years.)

I suppose network effects (and the posting model) make up a large part of their popularity, but there's something to be said for a reliable and functional interface that works well and doesn't change on a whim.

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