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.
The iPhone app ( http://cribq.com/go/appstore ) is by far the most popular part of it.
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.