FWIW Craigslist is a ghost town in Australia and virtually useless for buying & selling the type of stuff I used it for frequently when I lived in California. For example here's the furniture for sale section for Melbourne: http://melbourne.craigslist.com.au/fua/. Seems that in Australia people use Gumtree.com.au or even ebay.com.au for online classifieds.
Bye Bye Craigslist
251–260 of 312 posts
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :-)
Kika's analogy is also incorrect. What PadMapper does is takes a picture of information like a book, recipe, source code, etc. and then posts it on the Internet so that people can consume the information without going to Craigslist's website.
This is without the permission of Craigslist or of the original submitter or the content.
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#253Kudos 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…
When you post on Craigslist, you're posting on a public forum. What expectation of privacy could you possibly have?
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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#254For those wishing to take action: jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder @jimbuckmaster on twitter - http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster @craignewmark on twitter - http://twitter.com/craignewmark Simple email to copy and paste: Jim and Craig, I'm a longtime user of Craigslist, but I'm really disappointed in your decision regarding PadMapper. It would be great if you could…
Good luck, but I doubt it will work. My first experience with craigslist was trying to figure out why they had the capability to block my wife's ad for a free dog that contained a mispelled word while the site's creator was busy trying to tell the government that there was nothing he could do about the many child prostitution ads that appeared on craigslist.
Craigslist does not allow you to sell or give away animals -- it likely had nothing to do with a misspelling.
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 :-)
Kika's analogy is also incorrect. What PadMapper does is takes a picture of information like a book, recipe, source code, etc. and then posts it on the Internet so that people can consume the information without going to Craigslist's website. This is without the permission of Craigslist or of the original submitter or the content.
Without going to the craigslist this information is vastly incomplete. You just see where the property is. Then you click through to the craigslist website. Well, I haven't used PM for a while, but when I was renting it was that way.
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#256This 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.
Craigslist, Plenty Of Fish plus some others are examples of sites that took a really minimalist approach to design but managed to pull in a massive market share through fulfilling a customer need. Revenue from advertising paid the bills.
We wrote about ugly design before, how in some cases it actually increases conversion rates. It's odd but sometimes ugly is beautiful...
http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#257>> They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites.
PadMapper already has an app so couldn't they continue to use the listings in the app?
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
There's a lot to be said for it. It's constant in hn discourse to put great UI up there and to give advice on it. Yet if anyone here has sat on a Bloomberg terminal, used Craigslist, or even games like net hack or dwarf fort, it's pretty clear that interface can be damned. Not in all cases perhaps, agreed. But in these cases, after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficien…
> after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway.
Jared Spool has said that when you change the user interface - fairly dramatically - you frustrate your regular users because they are now unfamiliar with it and have to restart their learning/experience curve.
"At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don't like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background.
Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back."
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#259FWIW Craigslist is a ghost town in Australia and virtually useless for buying & selling the type of stuff I used it for frequently when I lived in California. For example here's the furniture for sale section for Melbourne: http://melbourne.craigslist.com.au/fua/ . Seems that in Australia people use Gumtree.com.au or even ebay.com.au for online classifieds.
gumtree is where it's at for apartment rentals and other big hard-to-ship odds and ends. then there's carsales.com.au for automobiles, and ebay for everything else. seems to work out okay.
Re: Bye Bye Craigslist
#260Earlier 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…
That makes sense. I think a lot of folks advocate maps and filter sliders because they over-estimate an average user's comfort level with such advanced features. I think a non-technical person is much more content with spending several times more time just sifting through listings manually instead of having to learn some whiz-bang (in their mind) gadget.