Craigslist posts shown on a map while viewing Craigslist housing
chrome.google.com
chrome.google.com
In 10 years, if all clients looking for apartments use a plug-in however, now you have cl paying for a lot more bandwidth than outsourcing this functionality to a centralized service, because for every 100 posts they scrape, they may only really look at one and they want the ability to show thousands on a single map.
I really don't understand why cl doesn't just do it themselves. It's not hard. I've built these maps countless times on top of all the popular mapping services and using different geocoders.
The hardest part is figuring out what the poster means in their location: where is "forth and main" [sic] or do you mean "East 4th St at Main St?", but I can see a simple address validator that updates a map with their location until they get something that will geocode correctly. That's the best solution and everyone wins here, except padmapper and the like, but there are other sources of data to map that aren't from craigslist too.
It's really trivial. The only other issue is cost, but those can be covered easily with all the money CL leaves on the table.
I don't CL ever made the argument that the problem was traffic. The whole "we're not hurting your servers" thing seems like a strawman to justify violating CL's TOS.
Of course, but not in PadMapper's case.
"Padmapper gets its data from 3Taps, a site that collects and republishes Craigslist's content. 3Taps, in turn, says it gets its data from cached copies supplied by Google and Bing, rather than Craigslist directly."
Source: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/craigslist-tighte...
This whole situation is very sketchy, honestly.
It's not hard to do a mediocre job, but it is super hard to build something really great.
And it's super easy to build something so shitty, that it'll drive away the users that you have now.
If you find issues or have feature suggestions, please add them and I will push fixes: https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/issues
I'll add the newyork urls to the manifest.
So I imagine they might not mind this at all..
If the general public is anything like me, a website is far more inviting than something like this.
Or maybe it really is as they say, and they just don't want 3rd parties doing this sort of thing, even though it's far more efficient. Personally I'm skeptical.
CL isn't opposed to these services existing on top of CL, it's opposed to them using CL to jumpstart their own business that is supposed to _replace_ CL.
Padmapper's eventual goal is to destroy CL - which, of course, CL is not going to go out of its way to enable.
What? I don't think that's ever been Padmapper's goal.
Are you seriously telling me that you're not trying to compete with Craigslist in the Apartment Listings space?
All incentives, evidence, and your actions point in this direction. The only dissonance is with what you're saying, not with what you're doing.
Even if you mean it now (in context, this seems unlikely), incentives have a way of wearing down your resistance. If PadMapper actually succeeded in supplanting Craigslist as the primary destination for apartment ads, you'd be outright foolish to not start accepting ads directly yourself ... ___which you already do, through PadLister.___
So how are you not aiming to surplant Craigslist, exactly? There's nothing wrong with competing with them, but it's insanely disingenuous to claim that you aren't.
Carrot and stick. That's not a highly principled stand.
> I disagree that competition is inevitable, though.
You're doing this out of the pure altruistic goodness of your heart?
All the incentives point in a single direction. There's nothing wrong with competing with Craigslist. You'd be foolish to not take a piece of the pie -- if you can. Likewise, Craigslist would be idiotic to give away the valuable data that you need to take a piece of their pie.
Please don't say that - it is disingenuous. Money is a strong motivator for 99.99999% of the world. Money lets you do things you otherwise could not do without that money. It's reasonable to say things like, "Money isn't the only motivator for me."
If Padmapper succeeds in becoming the primary target for traffic, and Padmapper has the ability to post listings (which it already does!), then Padmapper will innately be supplanting Craigslist.
It's unavoidable because the incentives are extremely strong, and doing so would be a natural, easy progression. That's just how humans work.
You said it yourself: same guy.
HousingMaps has zero desire to be anything other than a Google Maps interface to craigslist. That's it. Nothing more.
The instant they start moving out of that space (going commercial, accepting rental submissions, etc...) - they'll get shut down and/or hit with a C&D just like padmapper.
Noting that CG has recently gone on the offensive, I wonder where they would draw the line. At the moment, everything is done locally and it doesn't look like the extension is communicating with any central source. What if there was a central server that aggregated the results of all the distributed scraping to cache results and a) display them more quickly to users, and b) reduce the number of hits to CG?
Would CG rebuke the extension b/c its communicating with a central server and sharing CG's data in a manner not controlled by CG?
Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or
derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist
whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not
limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing,
iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.
Would CL really want to sue its users though?
There's an obvious market for people who want the amount of data that craigslist has, but wanted it displayed in a smarter way that allows better filtering and searching. They could make a killing licensing their data to 3rd party sites (or launching a new site with an improved interface). Instead they are giving users more and more reasons to switch to other services.