Craigslist Quietly Begins Testing The Feature It Sued PadMapper For Adding
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
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...
[2] - https://twitter.com/openstreetmap/status/237877987507322880
[3] - http://portland.craigslist.org/clk/apa/3207930288.html
If there's one thing that's been constant over the last 5 or so years, it's that craigslist doesn't change. They don't add a lot of features or functionality, and displaying maps is like scifi tech to them.
It's obviously a complex situation, but this could be viewed as a determined individual causing a behemoth to move. Sometimes you can effect change without making millions of dollars.
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
They need to put search results on a map, that's what makes padmapper useful.
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'.
PadMapper suits my needs far better. Dittos CLMapper.
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.
This article is confusing the issue by playing on the anti-patent/intellectual property vibe of most developers.
More of the same sensationalist journalism.
Apartment hunting is such a pain, I think a lot of folk would actually be willing to install addons if it made it easier.
It wouldn't surprise me if this was the case with Craigslist.
If you have more bandwidth on the legal side of your company for work than your development side, then your company is getting closer to being undead like SCO or Kodak. In this situation, it's high time to do something about that.
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.
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"?
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.
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.
Here is an example of what craigslist could be doing with maps and transportation options:
* 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.
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.
I really don't see any win for craigslist here, other than making their site a little bit less horrible for this particular function.
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.