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That said, I love PadMapper, having used it a couple of times for finding apartments in the Bay Area. So it's a bummer that they won't be able to show CL listings anymore.
The entrenched technologies are clearly excellent in the context of what they do. Can additions be made which allow one to comprehend data faster, summarize and/or visualize groups of data, filter out garbage and/or present things in a simpler way? Of course.
The agreement-violating leeching activity of some can be easily be forgiven because is not happening to your data, your servers, your love and your life's mission.
In my mind, remoras like this are exposing themselves to additional risk by doing something that is in violation of TOU and potentially a violation of various laws.
There are so many fitting cliches here that it's making my head spin.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see Craigslist ever stepping up their game and providing meaningful visualization. I can't really see why CL cares about where people are reading the listings - their business model is based on selling the listings, not monetizing the viewing of them. I suspect it's out-of-control lawyers at work.
Craigslist is closer to a non-profit than a business. You can't model them as a self-interested agent.
We have already seen the meteoric rise of many niche, category-specific Craigslist competitors eclipse CL in scale and influence, particularly in real estate. I suspect due to Craiglist's general crappy experience this fragmentation will continue.
And I for one think it's a good thing.
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 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.
If there were a site that had, say, all the rentals available in the SF Bay Area, it would be highly useful to you, as it would have gobbled up most of the benefits of the network effect available (of course, outsiders moving in wouldn't automatically know its name like they do for Craigslist, but that's relatively minor).
Once you've reduced your problem to "develop a really strong network in a very localized geographic area," it seems to me like the solution would become in reach, with a lot of hard work. You could even scrape pretty heavily early on, or enter it by hand if somehow that got around the ToS.
Maybe start at Berkeley or similar college town, maybe reducing yourself to using physical paper and highly targeted online advertising, and rely on students heavily to get the word out. Make it ridiculously easy for someone to post an ad on your site and have it automatically propagate to CL. Gradually expand to different parts of the Bay Area, and then pick out other localities to target. NYC, maybe, especially if you can somehow make its real estate market less dysfunctional.
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…
I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.
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"?
"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-...