huckleberries21

This response assumes that joining all social networks is user choice. Unfortunately, we live in a world where it hurts consumers NOT to be on some networks. LinkedIn (which also has had a history of horrible spamming in the past) is an example - sure, you can choose not to be on it, but you'll probably get dinged by hiring managers because your credentials somehow seem less legitimate if not corroborated by LinkedIn.

I don't think even Bilton is arguing that CL is not within their legal rights. He is just pointing out that it seems contradictory to their claimed culture of being community-driven, anti-SOPA, wanting to be a public good, and all that jazz.

You seem to be straining with "not optimal" phrasing here. It was only for mobile apps. PadMapper is a website. Non-starter.

It was in PadMapper's original blog post about the C&D letter

I don't see why not. By being a competitor that scrapes PM, they are accepting that there will be a delay in their data versus when it's available on PM. So unless their site was significantly better than PM in some way, in the really competitive apartment hunting markets, they would be strictly inferior to PM.

By your own metric, so did traffic for CL, and CL is the 8th most visited site in the US, so their Alexa traffic data is probably more stable than traffic data for PadMapper. http://traffic.alexa.com/graph?w=400&h=220&o=f&c...;

I guess I'm more sympathetic in this case because of the nature of the data: they're classified listings. The dynamic there is that landlords actually want lots of people to see their ad, and apartment hunters want to see as many good options as possible. So in this case, CL is a portal for that, but has set its policy to be such that it prevents the access both the landlords and the apt hunters want.

Sure, CL is in its right as a for-profit company to not share info. But it's not in the best interest of the people who post (i.e. the generators of that data). It's frustrating that CL gets to tout itself as some uniquely altruistic for-profit company that's not all about maximizing profit and more focused on the good of its users, then refuses to give the posters more exposure for the sake of keeping their monopoly. Then they automatically assume that every other competitor out there is some greedy capitalist trying to profit off the community, which it doesn't seem like PadMapper has done. It's got a lot of users, but not much of a profit model, and it's been this way for years.

It'll be interesting to see if crowd-sourcing can work for PadLister here. CL's incumbency gives them a strong monopoly on the small independent landlords and subletting.

Power of the social media vs. power of the network effect. Rooting for PadMapper on this one.

If they don't want to change their layout, why not let sites like PadMapper build on it the way that it has been doing? That way, old-fashioned users can keep using just CL and people in need of something slicker can use PM+CL.

I also don't understand why classifieds content is proprietary? Aren't they just facts? Please can someone explain?

I guess people are just disappointed since Craig and Jim have often claimed to not be super focused on profit and show a disdain for general corporate greed. They always say they put users first. So when they make a decision that makes their site harder to use and send their lawyers after a one-man company, I'm surprised in a disappointed kind of way.

Seems that it would be easy enough to get some voters to corroborate their claim (maybe some screenshots) rather than offer this non-proof elaboration?

At the risk of sounding naive, I still think that this kind of nonsense should be called out and not just some "norm" for online voting. The concept of consumer democracy has a lot of potential, and we need to keep objecting to bots and bought votes to make it reliable. Acceptance of unethical behavior just makes it more entrenched.