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That's the thing though, remember that old adage "The customer is always right" it means that at the end of the day, right or wrong, good or bad, allowed or not-allowed, caring or cold, sue-happy or not if the people that use the website are complaining (and so far it seems they are) than cragislist is broken, because it's leadership lost the respect of it's market. There is absolutely nothing stopping someone from making a new place-to-list-stuff-for-sale, that's easier to use, safer, and open source for that matter.

People, why aren't we just getting together to do just this, we've got UX people, web people, team management types and coders out the wazoo here. Let's just make a new craiglist already.

PS: I forgot, we've got marketing genius's here to, that can make miracles happen with just about zero dollars.

PPS: It doesn't matter how much that saying irritates you, as a business owner, try being successful without customers. If anything the saying is truest only when a majority of the customers believe the same thing, but there is still truth in it. (Obviously a jerk customer that other customers would shun will have no impact on you if you say I won't serve you.) "The customers are always right" :)

The customer isn't always right, but they're still the customer. That saying really grinds my gears.

Someone said/typed once that there will be no big CL killer - that they'll be pecked to death by many small replacements, such as Etsy in the crafts space. PM should be the CL replacement for the housing market, and their biggest problem to solve now is getting listings from another source, hopefully from landlords listing directly with them.

That old adage is dead. "The customer is always right" is a prescription for terror

Agreed wholeheartedly. The customer is often wrong, stupid, and has no idea what they want.

Harsh words but they ring true.

However, if people don't buy what your building you have made a mistake. It can be slick, salable, cheap, and marketed to the high heavens, but it's customers that decide if you have a business or a really expensive hobby.

I completely agree with you and got downvoted ;) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4322859

People seems to think that PM is the good guy and CL the bad guy I just see it a buiness trying to profit over one that's already existing and has a strong user base

It's not that simple. PM is trying to profit by innovating, CL is trying to profit by maintaining a monopoly position. They're entitled (legally) to do that, but they're not entitled to do so without losing the goodwill that they rely on for customers to give them their listing for free.

That's an extremely concise, and (I believe), correct, point.

The question is whether or not there's room for a craigslist clone, particularly one that can succeed by sharing its data openly with third-parties.

In truth, I'm doubtful. My reluctant conclusion is that there is, in fact, value in preventing the data from being spread across multiple interfaces and platforms, which itself could confuse users. This was essentially Twitter's stance when it came time to solidify their brand and reduce the number of clients.

There is real user value in knowing how their listing will be presented. I mean, if I'm listing a room for rent and "DruggieCriminalRoommateFinder" syndicates my listing, I'm probably not going to be happy with the response quality.

You speak as though CL is broken, and it clearly isn't, as a marketplace it functions well.

A marketplace can be popular and still broken. I think Craigslist's extreme insistence on not developing their product may have been a great move once upon a time but is catching up with them. PadMapper and apartment rentals is just one example.

> You speak as though CL is broken, and it clearly isn't, as a marketplace it functions well.

I'm guessing you've never had to find an apartment on Craigslist. Sifting through spam, scams, fake listings by agents, listings that have already been sold... sure, you can do it, but it's not efficient.

Or a car. Try searching for one of three brands you like within a specified range prices and years, excluding vehicles that have salvage titles, sorted by how close the seller is to you.

The query syntax for CL is reasonably sophisticated, it supports phrase match, grouping and it's possible to specify to specify a price range, using minAsk and maxAsk, you can also specify exclusion terms.

Clearly people are still finding value on CL. Hacker News readers are in a demographic that views the internet and the web VERY differently from how people who do not create internet services for a living view them. We care about a completely other set of factors then they do.

We don't bookmark facebook.com we rely on the browser history, having typed it in to the address bar once. They use google to search for the link to the facebook login.

They hear that CL is the biggest site for classified ads, so they post there. They don't care that padmapper will put their apartment on a map, they don't care about other sites.

CL did the hard work of attracting the people to the marketplace. Padmapper is not doing any of that hard work. It is my opinion, if you're doing the hard work of building the community and attracting the users, then you'll agree with CL on this issue. If you're a repackager, then you'll side with padmapper.

If your business idea is "Some corner of Craigs List with a better UI" then by all means, build the UI and then convince people to GIVE you their data.

Building a community takes work, but so does building a better UI. Both should be rewarded in the market, but because of network effects, the former is rewarded disproportionately.

To me, the word community connotes a separate entity that you interact with in some way, usually due to proximity. You might define the Craigslist Community as only people visiting craiglist.com but to me it would imply sites such as Padmapper that extend and improve Craigslist data. They are symbiotic and support the same community of users, Padmapper is not "repackaging" Craigslist like some sort of parasite like you imply.

Anecdotally, whenever I've used Padmapper to find a new apartment I would end up on craiglist.com anyway as Padmapper would often not contain the real estate agent's contact information.

Depends on the market - I understand the incentives in new york are such that scamming by agents is common, and problematic. In the Bay Area, (indeed, all of california to the best of my knowledge) - it's rare (as in, I've never heard of it happening) for a renter to pay a fee for a new rental, and so there is very little incentive to scam them. I've moved five times since 2003, every time using craigslist. If I want a graphical/map view, I just use housingmaps.com - unlike padmaps, they are simply offering a service to the user base, so, to the best of my knowledge, they've always had free access to the CL data.

I've never spent more than a week looking for a new place, and wouldn't consider using any service other than craigslist to do so.

Clearly the experience in other markets is not so positive.

Sorry, what's your claimed difference between padmapper and housingmaps?

As far as I can tell by looking at housingmaps, it's identical to padmapper, which tells me it's going to be shut down soon.

Actually, Craig has a history of speaking personally with founders using CL data, acting nice, and then mysteriously shutting down their mechanism for getting data without replying. Even if they weren't trying to make money.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/12/16/craigslist-yahoo-pipes/

Craigslist is broken. And successful. Those aren't mutually exclusive things. Newspapers are broken yet they'll do nearly $20 billion of dollars in revenue this year. They were broken and did peak revenue in 2005. Nokia was broken but had record profits two years ago. RIM was broken and did record profits last year.

Craigslist will eventually lose. It's just going to take longer than any of us reasonably expect.