
Meet Craiggers: It Blows Craigslist Out of The Water - nvineberg
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/meet_craiggers_it_blows_craigslist_out_of_the_wate.php?sms_ss=hackernews&at_xt=4dbf4499c76e92b8%2C0
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evlapix
I remember reading the terms of use before implementing some ideas I had. I'm
no attorney, but it seemed pretty clear that this kind of thing wouldn't fly.

2\. ACCESS TO THE SERVICE

craigslist grants you a limited, revocable, nonexclusive license to access the
Service for your own personal use. This license does not include: (a) access
to the Service by Posting Agents; or (b) any collection, aggregation, copying,
duplication, display or derivative use of the Service nor any use of data
mining, robots, spiders, or similar data gathering and extraction tools for
any purpose unless expressly permitted by craigslist. A limited exception to
(b) is provided to general purpose internet search engines and non-commercial
public archives that use such tools to gather information for the sole purpose
of displaying hyperlinks to the Service, provided they each do so from a
stable IP address or range of IP addresses using an easily identifiable agent
and comply with our robots.txt file. "General purpose internet search engine"
does not include a website or search engine or other service that specializes
in classified listings or in any subset of classifieds listings such as jobs,
housing, for sale, services, or personals, or which is in the business of
providing classified ad listing services.

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derekdahmer
Craiggers is powered by the 3taps API that just launched a month ago. They
postulate that postings are facts, which are public domain.
[http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2011/03/06/39377/ADataCommonsin...](http://ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2011/03/06/39377/ADataCommonsintheExchangeSpace.pdf)

Craigslist posts aren't facts, they are works that the authors grant a
copyright to Craiglists for.

Even _if_ a craigslist post is a fact, collections of facts like recipe books
are copywritable. Not to mention that the way they are harvesting these facts
is in violation of the TOS like you pointed out. They'll likely a) get sued
and/or b) figure out a licensing deal.

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evlapix
Phew.. I made the right call then. Thanks!

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drallison
The Craigslist user experience is just fine, IMHO. Rather than trying to
improve what's not broken, how about finding a way to get rid of the SPAM and
eliminate the scams. When it first started, Craigslist was great because there
was a community of trust. As it became popular, trust disappeared.

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chumbawumba
This is a great point. How do you think an application such as craiggers can
re-introduce that trust? Do you think integrating facebook/twitter would help?
How about a mashup of facebook marketplace and craigslist in which you could
send your friends posting, see what your friends have 'liked', etc.?

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ams6110
Any time I've bought or sold anything on craigslist the transaction has been
with a total stranger. I don't see how tying in Facebook would be anything
other than a needless annoyance.

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cloudhead
are you kidding me? The user experience on this thing is _terrible_.

    
    
      - No use of whitespace around text/content.
      - Broken back button on some of the pages
      - Placeholders on front page don't disappear when you click on field.
      - Terrible layout for browsing..
    

Sorry, but this thing is unusable.

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elliottcarlson
Additonally:

    
    
        - Narrowing down by location is way too slow (US -> NY -> NYC -> Staten island)
        - Using arrow keys while looking at an individual listing goes to the next listing, and does not scroll the single item
    

I'd rather browse regular CL than this.

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luffy
I just tried this out. Did a search for "golf clubs" in my location. Craiggers
gives me 6 results. Craigslist gave me 273.

Also, I still think the craigslist ui is actually better (I've never had a
problem with it). To me, categories work better as a list to drill into, not
as something to discover via search box.

Craigslist is a highly useful service, and as such, spam is inevitable (has
this been codified anywhere?). I hope that they get the spam under control.
But in a lot of categories, craigslist is still great.

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devinfoley
I work on the project. It would help me out greatly if you could email the
details of your search to me at dfoley@3taps.com. We really should have all of
the data.

Were you typing your location into the search box? That might explain the
difference. We don't currently support typing your location into the text box,
but maybe we should.

Thanks!

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timmaah
I see a name change in their not so distant future.

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minouye
Last year I installed the Craigslist Preview extension for Chrome. Sorry, but
no other 'browsing enhancements' could possibly make up for inline pictures.

[https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgn...](https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgnfeecolmmcgocefnf)

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razor
The back button; please fix it by allowing us to use it!

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xSACREDx
I've used www.searchtempest.com for a while now. I like the way they give you
a radius around your location for results. Makes it somehow easier.

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eli
Won't Craig just block them from scraping the site?

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fowkswe
Yes. I remember this the first time around - it was called listpic.com (which
was a far better user experience). It lasted all of a month before craig
lumbered in and shut the fucker down for serving ads off his content.

Craigslist needs to innvoate, or croak. It is absolutely useless for finding
an apartment in nyc. With a few flicks of effort, it could be so much better.

