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Bye Bye Craigslist

blog.padmapper.com

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Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#23

Post by akoumjian »

First it was Carsabi and now Padmapper. While I'm not surprised, as the Craigslist ToS explicitly prohibits crawling their site, it is incredibly frustrating that the website with all the data is unwilling to innovate and unwilling to help others innovate.

Craigslist will continue to be a mediocre, "good enough" solution. Since everyone associates online classifieds with craigslist, none of the other classifieds sites seem to have a chance. It's not even as if services like carsabi or padmapper are competing in any way with them.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#25

Post by untog »

citricsquid wrote: post #19

I decided to consider moving to the US on a whim about 6 months back (in the end I didn't) and decided to try and find an apartment and guage the cost of living. People recommended craigslist as apparently the US doesn't have a rightmove ( http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ ) type site. Craigslist was probably the worst experience I've had trying to find an apartment... I can't believe that people actually use it, why would…

Because it works just fine as it is, as far as Craigslist is concerned. It's not a mindset the HN crowd is used to, but Craigslist is an absolute behemoth, and they're doing just great. They also do a hell of a lot more than just accommodation, so might not be that incentivised to buy Padmapper.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#26

Post by dredmorbius »

ndubya wrote: post #15

Just out of curiosity, why would they not want you to use their classifieds? Unless I am missing something, they don't collect revenue for listings. I thought Craigslist was all about spreading good will. If Pad Mapper provides a more efficient way of spreading that good will, then why not? As a user of PadMapper, I am very disappointed to see this happen. Craigslist is almost unusable if you don't know the area you…

As best I can tell, it's a matter of corporate philosophy. Craigslist is predicated on local, person-to-person interactions. It has long taken pains to curtail uses of the system which allow aggregation of multiple CL local sites (there is, for example, no convenient way to search all of California for listings), or to include CL listings in third-party services.

As a long-time user of Craigslist, and a recent fan of padmapper, I'm disappointed, to say the least.

I do suspect it's time for some disruption in CL's space.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#27

Post by incongruity »

untog wrote: post #25
citricsquid wrote: post #19

I decided to consider moving to the US on a whim about 6 months back (in the end I didn't) and decided to try and find an apartment and guage the cost of living. People recommended craigslist as apparently the US doesn't have a rightmove ( http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ ) type site. Craigslist was probably the worst experience I've had trying to find an apartment... I can't believe that people actually use it, why would…

Because it works just fine as it is, as far as Craigslist is concerned. It's not a mindset the HN crowd is used to, but Craigslist is an absolute behemoth, and they're doing just great. They also do a hell of a lot more than just accommodation, so might not be that incentivised to buy Padmapper.

And it's that sort of logic that sees a business/market disrupted.

One might think that Craigslist, of all companies, would understand that.

Innovation beats litigation in most long-run scenarios, IMHO.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#28

Post by dclowd9901 »

citricsquid wrote: post #19

I decided to consider moving to the US on a whim about 6 months back (in the end I didn't) and decided to try and find an apartment and guage the cost of living. People recommended craigslist as apparently the US doesn't have a rightmove ( http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ ) type site. Craigslist was probably the worst experience I've had trying to find an apartment... I can't believe that people actually use it, why would…

Craigslist is, unfortunately, the "best" example of the network problem. Due to its popularity, it is entrenched.

That said, there are methods of disruption. AirBnB bootstrapped off Craigslist to get their initial dataset, and have since moved to their own content. That's probably the strongest approach if you're lucky enough to be able to move quickly when you need to.

Re: Bye Bye Craigslist

#29

Post by jamiequint »

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.

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