I've talked to at least a dozen people who moved into SF in the last 16 months and every one of them used Padmapper, including me. It's great. If Craigslist ever made acquisitions... or added features... this would/should be at the top of the list.
Agree with everything you said. I also moved to SF recently and used PadMapper. There's no reason to use anything else.
Unfortunately, the crime map overlay is kind of useless as it's total crime, not per capita, so it makes dense areas look more dangerous than they really are.
Yeah, I'm going to try redoing the overlay with homicides and other violent crimes pretty soon.
It's tough to normalize this kind of thing well, since there's an argument to be made that if there's a shooting on your block, it'll feel dangerous no matter how many people there are living there. Also, primarily commercial districts would get unfairly dinged if it was normalization per capita... would be better with foot traffic in that case.
A shooting is bad enough that it should show up regardless of the population density. But I certainly would feel a lot less safe if a shooting took place on a street where only 10 people lived, so density is still a valid factor.
I agree foot traffic might be a better metric than population, though.
Can anyone give a synopsis on why CL hasn't shut them down like they traditionally do with every site that repackages their data? I must be missing a nuance.
My theory (I wrote PadMapper) is that as long as it's light on their servers, helpful to their users, doesn't bombard them with ads, and sends users back to them, they're fine with it. PadMapper's just a search engine for part of their stuff.
Maybe. There are some features missing in the new API that PadMapper uses (tabbed info windows, for example), the benefit isn't completely clear, and it's likely to be a pretty large amount of work, so it's not a very high priority. Any reason you'd want it to be converted?
It is not my experience that craigslist shuts down those who use its data. I am torn over this. I'd like to rid my days of some of them, but I make great use of the RSS feeds myself.
Do you have CraigsList's permission to use their listings? I thought they were against this sort of site and the Housing Maps creator had special permission to do what he did.
A lot of the advantages are pretty subjective, and I'm biased (I didn't post this, by the way, I just learned about it via twitter).
Housingmaps is great, and was probably the inspiration for all these sites. The reasons I wrote my own were its limited selection and inflexible filters, which were pretty painful to use in my search.
Hotpads was around, but I didn't like it very much when I started this. I think it used to be more big buildings/complexes, and I don't like the flash-based map (I'm on a mac). It's perfectly usable, though. If you give both a try, I'd love to get your impressions.
This kind of things is cool, except the vast majority of apartments are not listed on Craigslist or Google or anywhere online.
One of these sites needs to use Mechanical Turk (or similar) to pay people to walk around and find "for rent" signs on the street, call the number, get the details, and data entry them into the site.
Then have a "did this number work for you?" thing on the site, and you don't get paid until someone successfully calls the landlord and verifies that it's a real rental. Or maybe do a double-check kind of setup where some AT users create listings and other verify them. Some way to handle fraud.
That would be an insanely useful apartment site. That site would become a household name.
My hunch is that in the Bay Area, most apartments are in fact on Craigslist. The exception that I'm aware of are apartments rented by primarily non-English speakers, such as places in SF Chinatown and other highly ethnic neighborhoods. There you might find listings in a local Chinese-language newspaper or on a bulletin board at a small store.
I've never lived in the Bay, so I can't say. But I've recently done apartment searches in San Diego and Phoenix, and by far the strategy of most landlords is just to put up a "For Rent" sign with a phone number outside.
Padmapper's a great utility for finding apartments. I used it before while looking for sublets in NYC. The site has a great UI and adds a ton of value - it's there just when you need it, it's like your Dropbox for apartment-hunting.
I've used the site in the past and its certainly better than most real estate search engines that seem to be stuck in the 90s.
I did see a need for a more collaborative/organizational tool when apartment hunting a couple of years ago while looking for apartments with my fiancee. So worked on building http://www.mapthatpad.com.
PadMapper is a very useful tool. I used it when I moved to NY. It filters results well, but the only problem I had was that it didn't always have the correct location. I assume it scrapes the link to the Google Map from Craigslist, so the inaccuracy might be from the advertiser who doesn't put in the correct geo-location.
Yeah, there are some issues with this, usually because the address is ambiguous or downright wrong. People throwing up stuff on CList aren't always very careful about their data entry, unfortunately.
Flagging helps with this somewhat, but that's dependent on high usage, which isn't the case in all areas. There is some automatic stuff that runs to filter obviously wrong things out, but I plan on looking more into that.
That's good to know. I thought I had found some real bargains in Manhattan but then realized the apartments were not in Manhattan, e.g. the address on Craigslist would simply be '34th St.' and PadMapper would plot it in Manhattan, but it is was actually 34th St. in Astoria.
It would also be good if PadMapper could scrape addresses from the title of posts (or from within the post) when there is no (full) address link at the bottom of a Craigslist post. This might be a bit more tricky since the way some of the addresses are written can't even be interpreted by Google Maps.
I still found PadMapper to be the best way to find apartments in areas I wanted to live, and it is a lot clearer than HotPads and Google Property search. One thing that I would really love is a more complete map that shows transportation and amenities like Google Maps. I often found myself having to re-search the address on Google Maps to find out what was in the neighbourhood.
My experiences are still fresh in my mind, so feel free to contact me if you want some more feedback.
Yeah, that'd be great if you could share (padmapper at gmail). I started recreating the google transit overlay, but it's pretty nontrivial to make a readable subway map programmatically and I got sidetracked on other projects.
If there's no map link, it attempts to infer based on that other info you mention and classifies them as likely inaccurate. Frequently it's the map link that's wrong, since people often file it in re wrong sub-CL and CL seems to modify the map link based on that info.
I'd be really interested if there were aspects you liked (or didn't like) about the others you tried.
They shut down Oodle a while back, but who knows if they were playing nice. Seems like Oodle was also hijacking the listings and putting them on their own site, which I'd imagine is one of the things they don't like.
Oh wow, this is fantastic! I'm moving soon and this is exactly what I need. Scanning down Craigslist text adds is just terrible. This is downright fun. Thanks so much for creating this!
Actually, there are very few pure maps sites - most are hybrid maps/list sites. I don't really see the point, though - the location is what matters most, and you always have the other filters to weed out the stuff you wouldn't want to look at anyway.
The website hasn't been updated in a long time, although it still works well. I built the site because housingmaps at the time was not up to date enough, was very incomplete, and didn't allow drill-down into neighborhoods. I also added things like streetview, and the very cool Microsoft bird's eye view. My goal was ultimately to add all kinds of data to help people move, similar to what the YC startup Movity was doing.
According to Craig, he only goes after sites which cause too much load on their servers. I base that on a few comments he has made on Quora. Evidence points more toward him going after heavily commercialized sites, or mixing data with other providers.
My impression is that furthermore, most of the problem sites are those who are trying to post ads. There are a million spammers and lazy businesses out there who would simply LOVE to be able to use Craigslist as their own personal ad bucket. Craig even calls them out specifically in the TOU as "third-party posting services."
Padmapper and similar can do their job with RSS feeds and occasional callbacks to see if ads are still alive, which I think alleviates a majority of load concerns. One area in which Craigslist has moved to shut down Craigslist search engines is where services have implemented multi-location search for sales items, which violates the Craigslist maxim of connecting people locally and introduces shipping and payment complications (Paypal) that they'd rather not be in the middle of. That Padmapper deals with a part of Craigslist that is necessarily localized may be their saving grace.
Some categories would love for CL to legitimize the third party services by charging and accepting bulk feeds (like CL does for real estate). Until the demand is served, third parties will innovate externally.
RSS feeds do not contain location information. I presume that is specifically to make this more difficult and deprive users of a decent interface for what is clearly location-based information and should be on a map. Furthermore, RSS feeds to not go back far enough in time to make this workable.
Very interesting. I had the same kind of idea with my site and made some pretty neat maps of pricing, crime and school scores, but I can tell you what I found out -- people don't care that much about digging into data like you think they would.
Users just want a better home shopping experience, with just a little trustable advice sprinkled on top. It makes sense now, but I was stuck in "cool product land." I wonder if Movity found the same thing in their customer development.
I've always wanted to use Craigslist data on my local real estate site but I know it's 100% against their TOS and I didn't want to give them any more headaches than they currently have.
It's great to see that people are able to do it but it just makes the whole situation more inscrutable. So I guess it's okay if you don't get caught or have good intentions. Well, I guess that's better than nothing.
They also made the SF Crime Map Overlay which was covered on HN: http://www.padmapper.com/blog/2010/07/19/san-francisco-crime...