

Craigslist Quietly Begins Testing The Feature It Sued PadMapper For Adding - mtgx
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120828/17414020198/craigslist-quietly-begins-testing-feature-it-sued-padmapper-adding.shtml

======
randomdrake
Whether you are on the side of PadMapper, or not, I'm glad to see that
Craigslist is finally starting to take some innovation seriously. A competitor
coming out to show them that they can do something different, causing them to
do something different, is a win for everyone, besides PadMapper.

That being said, it should be pointed out the original link[1] contains quite
a bit more information than this post.

* Craiglist looks like they will be hosting their own maps via OpenStreetMap[2].

* There are already examples[3] out in the wild.

Beyond this, it also appears that Craglist has even setup feedback[4] for
their maps.

[1] - [http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/craigslist-
maps...](http://idealab.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/08/craigslist-maps-test-
openstreetmap.php)

[2] - <https://twitter.com/openstreetmap/status/237877987507322880>

[3] - <http://portland.craigslist.org/clk/apa/3207930288.html>

[4] - <https://forums.craigslist.org/?forumID=3132>

~~~
seagreen
Nope! I respectfully disagree. It's a win for current craigslist users and
craigslist, but it's a loss for the ecosystem as a whole and everyone in the
future besides craigslist.

Imagine if email was a centralized system instead of a protocol. It would not
be good for users in the long run, even if the most righteous person ever was
in charge of it (btw Craig Newmark seems like a pretty cool guy). The
temptation for the email company to abuse its position would be too great
("Don't like our company? OK, don't use email!"). Even if the company wasn't
abusing users (this is the where we currently are with craigslist) it will
still always be glacially slow to innovate compared to a decentralized system
like actual email.

It actually would have been great if craigslist had stopped innovating
entirely and gotten replaced. Now we're back where we started.

EDIT: spelling

~~~
flatline3
It's not Craigslist's responsibility to hold still so that you can replace
them, nor are they somehow at fault for not doing so.

~~~
seagreen
Totally! Each company should work in it's own best interest. I'm only pointing
out that the interests of craigslist are neither the interests of developers
nor the general public.

------
IanDrake
Best I can tell, all Craigslist managed to do is put a map on the ad page.
That's not very useful.

They need to put search results on a map, that's what makes padmapper useful.

~~~
corywright
Exactly, this is not helpful at all. I easily. can put the address into Google
maps and see where this listing is located. The real value would be the
ability to search in a specific region or neighborhood.

~~~
_delirium
It solves about 50% of the problem for me: the biggest frustration for me is
not being able to quickly glance at a listing to see where it is. If I could
open 20 Craigslist listings in 20 tabs and see a map in each, that mostly
takes care of it for me.

~~~
zrail
Would <https://www.fivepad.me> solve the other 50% for you?

~~~
dredmorbius
It would be far better if that landing page were either a search page or
listings-posting page. Most likely search (that's going to be most of your
interest) with a link (or form) for posting.

I looked at it for 15 seconds (hey, I'm at my day job), couldn't figure it
out, and left.

PadMapper and Craigslist both have a far better usability proposition.

Just sayin'.

~~~
zrail
Fivepad isn't a listings site, it's a bookmarking app. You plug in the URLs
for the listings you find on other sites and it shows you them on a map and
helps you coordinate with roommates.

~~~
dredmorbius
That's .... very .... slow ....

PadMapper suits my needs far better. Dittos CLMapper.

~~~
zrail
Oh, I forgot to mention the bookmarklet. There's a bookmarklet. I see where
you're coming from, though, but we've all seen what CL does to people who try
to use their data. I believe Fivepad lives within the TOS boundaries, since
it's not doing generalized scraping.

~~~
dredmorbius
Yeah. I suppose if I was maintaining a list of URLs and could copy/paste them
in bulk it might be OK. In which case I'd probably write my own scraper to
search CL based on my own criteria and dump the raw links to plug in (a little
lynxs or wget + awk).

CLMapper does the cool job though of showing all of a current page's results
on a single map. Which, assuming the underlying geographic data are reliable,
is helpful.

------
Zimahl
They didn't sue PadMapper over the feature. The sued PadMapper because
Craigslist didn't want a pseudo-competitor using their data.

This article is confusing the issue by playing on the anti-patent/intellectual
property vibe of most developers.

------
salman89
This article is pretty off. This is not the "feature" of PadMapper. PadMapper
made it easy to locate aggregate postings on Craigslist, along with the
ability to filter those postings by attributes. Additionally, they provide
some auxiliary information, such as pricing vs median pricing, WalkScore, etc.
Craigslist just added an embedded map on the page - something that wasn't
already too far away with a click to "google map".

More of the same sensationalist journalism.

------
shardling
If I were PadMapper, I'd try as quickly as possible to mock up their previous
functionality as a Firefox/Chrome addon, which would just manually scrape
craigslist from within your browser.

Apartment hunting is such a pain, I think a lot of folk would actually be
willing to install addons if it made it easier.

~~~
dredmorbius
As with the CLMapper Chrome plugin?

------
jeremymims
Quite honestly, a lawsuit is a waste of time. All Craigslist ever had to do to
beat Padmapper was to add a search results map feature to their own product.

~~~
Goronmon
Depends I guess. If you have more bandwidth on the legal side of your company
for work than your development side, then a lawsuit might make sense.

It wouldn't surprise me if this was the case with Craigslist.

~~~
agwa
That's pretty much a hallmark of an evil company, is it not? (At the extreme
end you have patent trolls who have nothing but patents and lawyers.)

Whatever one's opinion of Padmapper and their legal/moral standing is, one has
to admit that Craiglist's actions are completely contrary to the image of a
non-evil company that they try to cultivate.

~~~
ohashi
It seems perverted that you're accusing the company whose data is being stolen
and re-purposed against their express wishes and terms of services is the
'evil' one in this scenario. Just because someone uses the law and lawyers to
get what they want doesn't make them inherently evil. In fact, it seems pretty
justified in this case.

~~~
potatolicious
Who says it's Craigslist's data? Last I checked the general public generates
this data without compensation from Craigslist. Both legally and morally, it
is _their_ data.

This would be like the USPS claiming my mail is actually theirs. They provide
a value-added service, but that grants neither legal nor moral claim over my
information.

> _" In fact, it seems pretty justified in this case."_

Encourage third-party developers to scrape the site and use your data,
claiming that your company is only concerned about undue server load.

Wait until third-party developer develops something that might actually be
worth something. Allow third-party developer to gain traction and evangelize
this product concept to the world.

Use legal force to shut down third-party developer and re-implement his
product yourself.

... What part of that strikes you sas "pretty justified"?

~~~
ohashi
"You automatically grant and assign to CL, and you represent and warrant that
you have the right to grant and assign to CL, a perpetual, irrevocable,
unlimited, fully paid, fully sub-licensable (through multiple tiers),
worldwide license to copy, perform, display, distribute, prepare derivative
works from (including, without limitation, incorporating into other works) and
otherwise use any content that you post. You also expressly grant and assign
to CL all rights and causes of action to prohibit and enforce against any
unauthorized copying, performance, display, distribution, use or exploitation
of, or creation of derivative works from, any content that you post (including
but not limited to any unauthorized downloading, extraction, harvesting,
collection or aggregation of content that you post)."

By posting, you're agreeing they can do whatever they want with your data and
prohibit others from taking it from their site. Morally and legally, I think
they are in the clear. There is no moral right to be able to scrape someone
else's site and use their data because you want to.

I don't think they encourage people to scrape their data at all. They have a
long history of blocking people and stopping people from doing exactly that.

Their data, their rules. It's not like Twitter where they pretended to be
developer friendly and screwed over everyone. Craigslist was NEVER developer
friendly. They were pretty upfront about it. PadMapper knew what they were
getting into, even acknowledged they were in the wrong, and continued to do
what they were doing anyways. How Craigslist gets portrayed as the bad guy is
shocking to me.

------
systemtrigger
Craigslist isn't suing PadMapper for adding maps, it's suing because it sues
everyone who republishes CL data (with the exception of generic search
engines). CL's real target is 3Taps, which is where PM gets its data. If CL
loses the lawsuit, the most valuable piece for developers remaining will be CL
images. 3Taps' API includes links to those images, as well as much other
useful data, but CL is never going to let developers hotlink to the pictures
it hosts. (One could launder those image links through a 3rd party service,
but the scope is too large to be undetectable, besides it introduces an
ethical issue.) The larger play here, which may in time overtake CL itself, is
3Taps' plan to open the classifieds space in a big way.

------
creativename
I'm sure this has been answered before, but why does it matter to Craigslist
if it's data is being used elsewhere and is clearly marked as Craigslist data?

Say Craigslist is paid for real estate listings: they already have the money,
and they don't make any additional money off of advertising, so why does it
matter where someone accesses that information?

I'm genuinely curious why this isn't similar to Twitter, for instance,
allowing developers to show tweets in their own applications. Except in this
case, people are paying to "tweet" (post real estate listings). Also, for this
question, I'm ignoring Twitter's recent policy changes.

I suspect I'm being naive here, and the issue may be that they just really
don't want other people profiting from their data, but I guess I just don't
get it.

~~~
jaredsohn
The problem is that if another site has the same listings as Craigslist and
provides a better user experience, people looking to rent an apartment will
start visiting that site instead of Craigslist. Over time, people looking to
list apartments that want an audience of renters would start listing on that
site directly instead of Craigslist, since that is now the best place to find
renters.

~~~
creativename
Ah, so in that case it would literally come down to not wanting to have to
innovate. If they truly thought that people preferred to have it the way it
is, you'd think that they wouldn't be afraid of this.

------
kimura
Good start, however Craigslist needs to do a lot more than adding maps. For
example, real estate listings need to have transportation options. Part of the
reason why we started <http://www.realtywarp.com> is because renters need more
information about a given neighborhood before visiting a listing. Renters tend
to have a preference for a specific square or metro. That said, they will not
be visiting a listing if they do not have that information immediately
available.

Here is an example of what craigslist could be doing with maps and
transportation options:

<http://boston.craigslist.org/nos/fee/3181869892.html>

~~~
soperj
Yah, except that looks terrible and if I was looking through craigslist for an
apartment, I'd just move onto the next listing.

------
guelo
I wonder how useful a map really would be since craigslist already provides a
neighborhood filter on the apartment search. My experience when looking for an
ideal apartment is that there normally aren't that many results that fit all
your desired criteria so you have to relax your criteria and expand your
search into adjacent neighborhoods. You're probably not going to find the
perfect apartment in the exact spot on the map that you want.

~~~
sadawi
I find that while a neighborhood filter gets the job done, its usability isn't
great, for a number of reasons:

* You have to roughly know the boundaries of all the neighborhoods for the list of names to be useful

* A one-dimensional arrangement of names doesn't correspond well to the 2D relationships you probably care about.

* Many neighborhoods don't map well to regions I care about. I often find myself selecting Bernal Heights, Mission District, and Noe Valley to capture the idea of "the area around 24th and Valencia", for example.

~~~
drstewart
Not to mention realtor creativity in deciding where an apartment is located.
The Tenderloin? That's totally practically Nob Hill!

------
dwhly
Check out this listing at 48th and Balboa-- pin out in the ocean. Really? So
pitifully bad. Unfortunately, it's what we've come to expect from them.

And yes, as others have said-- this isn't anything close to the feature set we
want, that has now been taken from us: the customer.

<http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sub/3237512654.html>

------
dboat
The best outcome for users is being able to search one site listing all
possible ads from many sources. Unless craigslist starts bringing in others
results, and I'm not saying they should, it's still less useful for apartments
than padmapper.

I really don't see any win for craigslist here, other than making their site a
little bit less horrible for this particular function.

------
blackysky
I still think a partnership would have been the best choice for Craigslist
versus suing PadMapper and start from scratch...PadMapper does have an
expertise and data. Craigslist could have used that precious talent and data
to create a better product....

~~~
mburns
It seems like you are overvaluing the 'expertise' required to do what
PadMapper did.

It makes perfect sense for Craigslist to want to do this entirely in-house,
because the barrier to feature parity with a site like PadMapper isn't very
high. And now PadMapper can't pull the rug out from under Craigslist and win
over the userbase.

~~~
blackysky
you are undervaluing the data you and I don't see.... Last time I check
Craigslist isn't their only source....I understand why Craigslist did it but I
still think Craigslist would have been better with padMapper...

------
sytelus
Good artists copy, great artists steal, bad artists sue you and release half
assed version of your idea.

