11 ms·

Bye Bye Craigslist

• sh1mmer 14y ago
  Good luck, I think it's a sign of your success that this has happened. Providing more value with their data than they do is a threat to their business.
  • juan_juarez 14y ago
    I can't see Craigslist ever stepping up their game and providing meaningful visualization. I can't really see why CL cares about where people are reading the listings - their business model is based on selling the listings, not monetizing the viewing of them. I suspect it's out-of-control lawyers at work.
    • ahi 14y ago
      If anyone gets too much traction they can cut out the middleman.
    • jessriedel 14y ago
      Craigslist is closer to a non-profit than a business. You can't model them as a self-interested agent.
      • potatolicious 14y ago
        And like many other non-profits, the quality of the service shows - the service is merely "good enough" (in many categories, far less than good enough), with no competitive pressure to improve. We have already seen the meteoric rise of many niche, category-specific Craigslist competitors eclipse CL in scale and influence, particularly in real estate. I suspect due to Craiglist's general crappy experience this fragmentation will continue. And I for one think it's a good thing.
        • jessriedel 14y ago
          Well, the lack of competitive pressure stems more from network effects than being non-profit per se. Because of this, I don't see the fragmentation as a good thing. One of two things will happen in each craigslist market (rentals, used goods, ridesharing, etc.): either a single for-profit company will ride networks effects and establish a monopoly, or there will be severe fragmentation. If the former, then you can expect some features to improve (in order to steal the market from craigslist in the first place) but many other things to languish due to a lack of competitive pressure. (Also, if it's a for-profit company, you'll pay money.) This is ebay. If the latter, then it will no longer be possible to go so one site to search in that market, greatly decreasing consumer utility. This is how classified ads worked before craigslist. Much better is a well-run, benevolent non-profit. Wikipedia, though not flawless, is pretty much the epitome of this idea. It's scary to think what it would be like if Wikipedia's data was spread over dozens of websites of varying quality and motivation. (Then again, in the scenario no one would bothered to write most of the articles anyway.) Craigslist doesn't fit this exactly because they impose a philosophy ("localism"?) which most people don't share and which decreases usability.
          • potatolicious 14y ago
            There are, for example, real estate websites that are eating the CL for-rent category's lunch right now. Craigslist isn't doing much in response to these competitors, despite the fact that in some markets (particularly SF and NYC where I have experience) Craigslist is now very firmly in second place (or worse). I've been apartment hunting in NYC lately, and it's mind-boggling what proportion of Craigslist posts are scams compared to other sites like StreetEasy or NYBits. IMO if Craigslist was run more like a scrappy startup looking for their big exit, they'd have more than responded to these competitors by now. The network effect exists, but IMO is an insufficient explanation of their lack of action. I agree that the fragmentation is, all things being equal, a bad thing for users - but considering how utterly useless Craigslist's moderation systems are (many categories are full of duplicate posts, spammers, and scammers), and how poor the UX is otherwise (search? hah!), I welcome it. Fragmented sites like PadMapper, StreetEasy, etc, have done way more to ease the life of renters than Craigslist in the last decade.
• BadassFractal 14y ago
  I used PadMapper with great success numerous times, I hope it can survive this.
• mikemoka 14y ago
  Quite a misleading title..I think many clicked thinking to read about an unexpected shutdown of Craigslist actually
  • ericd 14y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean it that way - if you know what PadMapper is and see the URL, I think it makes sense.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • iamdave 14y ago
      With the OP here, I saw the thread title and silently went "thank god" to myself immediately knowing what this meant, having used PadMapper very extensively in the last year after moving to Austin. I knew it meant a good portion of ads being gone, but I was going to get much more qualitative results in finding a condo. I really hope PadMapper can make up the volume but continue to have good results for people searching. It's a wonderful resource.
      • ericd 14y ago
        Haha you could always filter out Craigslist with the sources filter (though it's a bit hidden)
    • recursive 14y ago
      Some people don't know what PadMapper is. Like me for example.
• cwilson 14y ago
  Curious if Live Lovely (http://livelovely.com/ http://livelovely.com/) will get a similar cease and desist. They do essentially the exact same thing, but with a nicer design.
  • JaggedJax 14y ago
    Except Padmapper works everywhere craigslist does. I went to livelovely just now and they don't have my city. It's not exactly a small town. Also their filtering is nothing compared to padmapper. On a more related note, I would imagine any sites like this that come up on Craigslist's radar will get a similar notice.
• bcrescimanno 14y ago
  I hope this doesn't get down-voted for the confusing title (I know it's the title of the Blog post itself; but out of context it's a bit misleading). When I moved from Atlanta to Boston, PadMapper was invaluable in finding a place to live. Given that 1) we didn't know the area, and 2) most rentals in Boston and Cambridge are rented by individuals rather than part of larger complexes, it was great to be able to have the listings from Craigslist on a map. Ditto when I moved from Boston to San Jose. My wife and I were only interested in a house for rent and the vast majority of those could be found on Craigslist. Again, we didn't know the area so having a map was beyond valuable. I sincerely hope Craigslist does a 180 on this one; PadMapper is a great tool that deserves access to that data.
  • ArcticCelt 14y ago
    >I hope this doesn't get down-voted for the confusing title Specially when the site is down. Pretty annoying to find this kind of reddit like title here. From comments my guess is that it's some blog post from someone who is pissed off at CL for forbidding them to use some web app they built (PadMapper?) that scrap content from the CL site or something like that.
  • sliverstorm 14y ago
    PadMapper is a great tool that deserves access to that data. Why do they deserve access?
    • jonny_eh 14y ago
      Because it's highly beneficial to people that use craigslist, including the people that list properties. Craigslist is only hurting itself!
    • bcrescimanno 14y ago
      "deserve" is probably the wrong word (forgive me for hastily typing out my comment before running off to a meeting). My point was really about PadMapper acting in good faith with Craigslist; they do send traffic to Craigslist for the full data on the properties and such. They're a good company doing good things--and it's sad that Craigslist's refusal to innovate has now bled over into "no one else can innovate for us"
• kenrikm 14y ago
  Craigslist is in major need of disruption. Actually apartment finding in general sucks I can't think of a single goto place to look for apartments other then Craigslist and that just proves point #1!
  • AgentConundrum 14y ago
    > Craigslist is in major need of disruption. I rarely hear anyone mention Craigslist in Canada. We have Kijiji [1] but its UI isn't significantly different than that of Craigslist. The home page is essentially just another long list of categories, etc. Maybe there's something about that design that works exceptionally well for this type of site. [1] http://www.kijiji.ca http://www.kijiji.ca
    • arcos 14y ago
      I find that this is the case for smaller urban centres, in my experience. For Toronto, I use a combo of Viewit, Craigslist and realtor.ca (evil UI).
  • ghshephard 14y ago
    I guess a lot depends on where you live - Craigslist in the Bay area is like magic for finding apartments, or a room to rent. The Bay Area has a very advanced craigslist option, where you can sort not only by geographic area (Peninsula), you can even zoom down to a particular city. Add filtering by price and find a place to live in the Bay area has always (Since 2003) been painless for me - particularly as I don't drive, and so getting a place that is _precisely_ in the right place is important. Housingmaps provides a free map interface for those who find such a thing useful. I don't actually know how anyone would _improve_ craigslist (for me) - I am not sure what the disruption would be - as the free service provides me 100% of what I would want from such a system.
    • juiceandjuice 14y ago
      Yeah but that still sucks, because people rarely know which neighborhood they are in. With padmapper, I could see exactly what was where and not have to worry about somebody thinking excelsior is somehow the mission, and the price per room/cats and dogs/walk score/etc... extras are amazing and integrated, especially if you don't know an area. I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.
• limanoit 14y ago
  oh sad to hear this. padmapper service with craigslist really helped me!
• bryanjclark 14y ago
  Padmapper's a brilliant solution. I'd like to think that Craigslist is building their own great solution, but knowing how slowly CL moves on everything, I sincerely doubt they'd build a worthwhile replacement. Bummer! Padmapper's helped me and a few friends find our apartments in SF.
• ndubya 14y ago
  Just out of curiosity, why would they not want you to use their classifieds? Unless I am missing something, they don't collect revenue for listings. I thought Craigslist was all about spreading good will. If Pad Mapper provides a more efficient way of spreading that good will, then why not? As a user of PadMapper, I am very disappointed to see this happen. Craigslist is almost unusable if you don't know the area you are looking to move to.
  • dredmorbius 14y ago
    As best I can tell, it's a matter of corporate philosophy. Craigslist is predicated on local, person-to-person interactions. It has long taken pains to curtail uses of the system which allow aggregation of multiple CL local sites (there is, for example, no convenient way to search all of California for listings), or to include CL listings in third-party services. As a long-time user of Craigslist, and a recent fan of padmapper, I'm disappointed, to say the least. I do suspect it's time for some disruption in CL's space.
• angryasian 14y ago
  I think its pretty well documented that craigslist is known to shut down services that use craigslist data. I really don't think should come as a surprise to the creator.
• sayemm 14y ago
  Really sorry to hear this. I've successfully found 3 different apartments in perfect locations through PadMapper (and one that I'm moving into in 2 weeks actually). And I've had several friends use it too. Great job with all the time you've put into the site, Eric - hope the service pulls through this somehow, but also looking fwd to seeing what you work on next if you decide to move on.
• citricsquid 14y ago
  I decided to consider moving to the US on a whim about 6 months back (in the end I didn't) and decided to try and find an apartment and guage the cost of living. People recommended craigslist as apparently the US doesn't have a rightmove (http://www.rightmove.co.uk/ http://www.rightmove.co.uk/) type site. Craigslist was probably the worst experience I've had trying to find an apartment... I can't believe that people actually use it, why wouldn't they build a padmapper esque system (or acquire padmapper)?
  • untog 14y ago
    Because it works just fine as it is, as far as Craigslist is concerned. It's not a mindset the HN crowd is used to, but Craigslist is an absolute behemoth, and they're doing just great. They also do a hell of a lot more than just accommodation, so might not be that incentivised to buy Padmapper.
    • incongruity 14y ago
      And it's that sort of logic that sees a business/market disrupted. One might think that Craigslist, of all companies, would understand that. Innovation beats litigation in most long-run scenarios, IMHO.
  • dclowd9901 14y ago
    Craigslist is, unfortunately, the "best" example of the network problem. Due to its popularity, it is entrenched. That said, there are methods of disruption. AirBnB bootstrapped off Craigslist to get their initial dataset, and have since moved to their own content. That's probably the strongest approach if you're lucky enough to be able to move quickly when you need to.
    • scarmig 14y ago
      The thing is, I think Craigslist's network effect is exaggerated. Its network is very clustered because nearly all of it (particularly housing) is focused on people in a particular area. Compare to Facebook, which has a large degree of inter-connectedness between all clusters. If there were a site that had, say, all the rentals available in the SF Bay Area, it would be highly useful to you, as it would have gobbled up most of the benefits of the network effect available (of course, outsiders moving in wouldn't automatically know its name like they do for Craigslist, but that's relatively minor). Once you've reduced your problem to "develop a really strong network in a very localized geographic area," it seems to me like the solution would become in reach, with a lot of hard work. You could even scrape pretty heavily early on, or enter it by hand if somehow that got around the ToS. Maybe start at Berkeley or similar college town, maybe reducing yourself to using physical paper and highly targeted online advertising, and rely on students heavily to get the word out. Make it ridiculously easy for someone to post an ad on your site and have it automatically propagate to CL. Gradually expand to different parts of the Bay Area, and then pick out other localities to target. NYC, maybe, especially if you can somehow make its real estate market less dysfunctional.
• staunch 14y ago
  Was there some attempt made at monetizing Padmapper? IIRC Craigslist isn't super hard core about not-for-profit projects using their data, but takes a hard line on commercial use.
• whichdan 14y ago
  This really sucks. Finding an apartment in Boston on Craigslist is nearly impossible without PadMapper.
• AmericanOP 14y ago
  Craigslist should buy you, not block you. I'm basically a Luddite and yours is the one service I always recommend.
  • ceworthington 14y ago
    Maybe they should block you then buy you. Probably would help them in the negotiation... But in all seriousness, PadMapper was a great service and seemed to do it the "right" way (providing deep links back into Craigslist's site/content), if there is a "right way" to unofficially gather data without use of a public API.
• akoumjian 14y ago
  First it was Carsabi and now Padmapper. While I'm not surprised, as the Craigslist ToS explicitly prohibits crawling their site, it is incredibly frustrating that the website with all the data is unwilling to innovate and unwilling to help others innovate. Craigslist will continue to be a mediocre, "good enough" solution. Since everyone associates online classifieds with craigslist, none of the other classifieds sites seem to have a chance. It's not even as if services like carsabi or padmapper are competing in any way with them.
  • zach 14y ago
    Craig Newmark has often said that they innovate in response to their community. That would seem to have three effects: - Incrementalism: faster horses instead of cars - Suburbanism: those in the community want it to stay familiar - Majoritarianism: outsiders, potential users, occasional users, mavericks and dreamers have little impact
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
  • huckleberries21 14y ago
    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.
• jamiequint 14y ago
  This is just offensive. It would be one thing if Craigslist was doing their best to satisfy their customers and they wanted to shut down others who were scraping their site and leeching off their business. However, Craigslist puts absolutely no effort into making their product usable. The continued existence of Craigslist is just a testimony to the enormous strength of network effect lock in.
  • binaryorganic 14y ago
    Disagree. Craig Newmark has said that he's scared to make drastic changes to the UX specifically because he doesn't know what magic recipe keeps people coming back. Do I like the CL layout? Nope. Does that mean other people should steal the content and profit from it? Probably not.
    • jamiequint 14y ago
      The magic recipe that keeps people coming back is that Craigslist has a large network. I would be willing to bet a large amount of money that adding a map to search results and letting me put an upper limit on the number of bedrooms I'm looking for would not make people less likely to use Craigslist.
      • juiceandjuice 14y ago
        To be fair to Craigslist, since everyone and their grandma uses it, I'd imagine a lot of users have underpowered computers, outdated browsers, and low bandwidth connections. I've seen padmapper slow wayyyy down on my i7 macbook with 8GB ram, I can't imagine what it'd be like on grandma's 5 year old budget PC.
        • psc 14y ago
          Features can be added without alienating users with outdated tech. Just conditionally show the improved site only to users who can run it. It's a poor excuse, especially since Craigslist hasn't even tried to improve the layout of the site, which has no effect on load speed and compatibility.
• martingordon 14y ago
  This is horrible. I used Padmapper extensively when looking for an apartment here in New York two months ago. I guess I'm never moving again...
• makmanalp 14y ago
  I've used padmapper twice to get an apartment so far, and It's great! I've loved the fact that it's constantly improving and has exactly the features I need: Walkscore, bookmarking, map, proper filters. It's strictly better. To the author: I would have paid for this. It sucks that this waas mainly an interface to craigslist, and now they're gone. I hope this gets enough critical mass that eventually so that the unusable but unexplicably popular horror that is craigslist apartments just dies an ugly death. Maybe you can even sell it to them, who knows? All I know is while CL's response is perfectly rational, I can't help but be pissed off that I'm locked into a shitty product that is only surviving because of head start, critical mass, network effects, etc. Edit: An alternate approach (that would admittedly not help Eric) is to open source padmapper and let people do local installs for themselves. Would be pretty hard to ban that. Although I'm not sure on the legality of scraping.
  • iamwil 14y ago
    Just a clarification, padmapper will continue to exist with listings from a lot of other places. It will just no longer have Craigslist listings, unless you help send an email to Craig and Jim.
  • X-Istence 14y ago
    Padmapper has data from more than just craigslist ...
• fleitz 14y ago
  Kudos to CL for standing up for user privacy. When I use CL it's with consideration of their TOS which bans these practices. When padmapper copies the data they violate my privacy, my copyright, and the agreement between myself and craigslist as outlined in the TOS. What padmapper is doing is a violation of many data privacy laws like PIPEDA, EUDPD, and various copyright acts. If padmapper wants the data why don't they just obtain consent from the CL posters, instead of copying it without consent. Would the padmapper team be ok with me deciding to stick their logo where ever I deem it necessary? I bet they'd probably sue me for copyright and trademark violation.
  • refurb 14y ago
    When you post on Craigslist, you're posting on a public forum. What expectation of privacy could you possibly have?
    • fleitz 14y ago
      The expectation outlined in the TOS, as well as the privacy guidelines set out in PIPEDA.
      • biot 14y ago
        I fail to see how PIPEDA is involved. The information being published on PadMapper is information which you've chosen to publicly disclose. The fact that this publicly disclosed information is showing up on a site you didn't intend might make a case for tort law or copyright law, but there is no disclosure of information that you expected to remain private.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
      • ericd 14y ago
        Deletion should be reflected on PM reasonably quickly, not so much edits, though, to reduce crawling load.
• mutant 14y ago
  The pro CL comments here are ridiculous and so anti-innovation. "Don't crawl my data bro!". PM wasn't modifying the data in any way, just redis playing it on a damn map. Now CL is useless, yet again, for housing.
• mehulkar 14y ago
  I don't think I would have ever found a place to stay in SF after moving here 4 months ago if it wasn't for CL's data and PM's ease of use.
• mullingitover 14y ago
  This is a damn shame. I used padmapper to find my last two places. CL should've been doing this feature on their own, navigating rental listings on their site is a nightmare. The map feature was a godsend.
• makeramen 14y ago
  Carsabi (YC W12) was also affected by this recently. Especially annoying midway through my car search. It is really disappointing that Craiglist won't license their data.
  • romansanchez 14y ago
    I would say this pretty much killed Carsabi.
    • pg 14y ago
      Actually not. Enough of their content is direct from dealers that it looks like they will be able to bounce back.
      • makeramen 14y ago
        Yeah, they still have quite a lot of content, and to be honest craigslist listings were some of the worst on there. Still, it was handy to just have one go to place for car shopping.
  • cgag 14y ago
    I'm kind of surprised that a company based around scraping CL would get into YC. I know a lot of people do it, but it wasn't exactly unknown that it was against craigslist's TOS.
  • cgag 14y ago
    I'm kind of surprised that a company based around scraping CL would get into YC. I know a lot of people do it, but it wasn't exactly unknown that it was against craigslist's TOS.
• juiceandjuice 14y ago
  So should they ban Google? Because I use google to search for things on craigslist with much more success than craigslist's system, in the same way I used Padmapper to find a room/house (3 times in the past year... I move a lot) This is stupid.
• japiccolo 14y ago
  Unfortunately, scraping another site's information is generally not a long-term viable business plan (speaking from personal experience). I suppose CraigsList, much like insurance companies, doesn't like its valuable information being displayed on other websites without endorsement or consent. That said, I love PadMapper, having used it a couple of times for finding apartments in the Bay Area. So it's a bummer that they won't be able to show CL listings anymore.
• Avitas 14y ago
  I would make the same argument that many are making with Cragislist about IRC, the use of multi-digit telephone numbers and a huge variety of other entrenched technologies that work reliably for enormous numbers of people. The entrenched technologies are clearly excellent in the context of what they do. Can additions be made which allow one to comprehend data faster, summarize and/or visualize groups of data, filter out garbage and/or present things in a simpler way? Of course. The agreement-violating leeching activity of some can be easily be forgiven because is not happening to your data, your servers, your love and your life's mission. In my mind, remoras like this are exposing themselves to additional risk by doing something that is in violation of TOU and potentially a violation of various laws. There are so many fitting cliches here that it's making my head spin.
  • MichaelGG 14y ago
    Or maybe those that are "forgiving" find that this "leeching" is creating a positive benefit for society as a whole, and that ultimately, IP laws are there to benefit the public.
• smattiso 14y ago
  This sucks. Craigslist is not setup to handle apartment searches at all. I literally just finished finding an apartment and I solely used padmapper. I can't imagine having to go through the process just using craiglist search. Bummer.
• robmaceachern 14y ago
  Wow this is really surprising, especially after reading Craig Newmark's answer on Quora just the other day to the question "Why hasn't anyone built any products on top of Craigslist data?". His response: "Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple." http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-top-of-Craigslist-data http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-...
  • jaredsohn 14y ago
    To clarify for everyone, while the parent read the answer a few days ago, Craig wrote this response in 2010.
    • jongraehl 14y ago
      Good point. What didn't seem a threat then, must now. You should expect some changes in strategy over >1yr.
• wave 14y ago
  Padmapper has been a wonderful service. It is confusing why Craigslist is blocking it unless they (Craigslist) are thinking about coming up with similar user interface soon. Craigslist has been hiring UI designers.
• blackysky 14y ago
  At the end of the day it is Craigslist's data. I know padmapper was useful for a lot of people so the next smart move is to build your own data. A "craiglist" focus on rental only with the same features. The sad reality is you need your own platform to scale any type of services like that.Is it going to be easy and fast to build. The answer is no. However the reward and opportunity are huge.... Of course it would be great if craigslist could have an API or licence his data but it won't happen in a bear future ...
  • icebraining 14y ago
    At the end of the day it is Craigslist's data. Nope. It's the users' data. Craigslist only has a license to use it.
    • jbigelow76 14y ago
      In that case Craigslist is doing right by its users, the licencor of the data, since the licensor has not granted a license to padmapper to use said data.
  • legutierr 14y ago
    Well, it's Craigslist's data, but it's also the advertisers' data. If I were to advertise an apartment I owned, I would rather put it on Padmapper than on Craigslist, if only Padmapper had the critical mass. But maybe that's what Craigslist is worried about. I'll tell you one thing, though, if Padmapper wasn't competing with Craigslist before today, it certainly is now.
• kthakar3 14y ago
  I wonder why CL doesn't create an API and charge for it's usage. The data is clearly valuable and they own it, but that doesn't mean that it can't use multiple views.
  • runako 14y ago
    This is only useful if the teams scraping CL have budget to pay a market rate for the data. Considering that CL seems to have a lock on this data for many markets, I'm guessing that's worth a lot of money (which startups will not be able to afford).
    • product50 14y ago
      If they cannot afford, then they should not be there. Scraping illegally is not a long term solution. Craigslist should conduct some market research from their end to charge a "reasonable" fee which fills in their coffers as well as allow development an ecosystem around their data. Even DuckDuckGo pays for Yahoo! BOSS Search API to show their results. Not sure why CL hasn't thought about it.
  • slouch 14y ago
    RSS feeds are almost an API.
• jluxenberg 14y ago
  Just sent a mail to {craig,jim}@craigslist.org. Not sure if it will help but if they hear enough noise about it, maybe they'll change their stance.
  • coreygoodie 14y ago
    It's most likely an indication that they'll be developing their own UI.
• mwhite 14y ago
  Take them to court. I will donate to your legal fund.
  • icebraining 14y ago
    On what grounds, exactly? They have every right to deny you access to theirs servers.
    • mwhite 14y ago
      They have every right to implement technical barriers to scraping. Whether they can invoke the law to establish a legal barrier to re-publishing their proprietary-but-public facts -- not even the apartment summary text, just extracted metadata -- is not at all clear. When an auction aggregator was sued by eBay for doing something similar, the judgment in eBay's favor rested on the fact that the aggregator was posing a real undue technical burden, not the inherent fact that they were scraping.[1] Since I assume Padmapper does intelligent scraping, they might have a fairly good case. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBay_v._Bidder%27s_Edge
      • DannyBee 14y ago
        I think you may be confusing two issues. It's almost certainly true that they could republish the data without violating any law. That has nothing to do with whether they have the right to scrape the data from the website. IE do not confuse their right to republish the data with the right to get it from a particular source in a particular way. The line of cases you are citing is also about trespass to chattels, which is a pretty bad claim to make about website scraping (for the reasons the california supreme court set out in Intel vs Hamidi). It was mainly used back in the days when courts barely knew what websites were. Trespass to chattels may still get used when you can show actual harm caused by the scraping, but most claims nowadays would be around terms of use violations, which are a much more grey area (some courts have gone for it, some not).
• readme 14y ago
  I am totally upset. I wanted to use padmapper to search for an apartment for my next move. I had been looking with it for months and wow it was super helpful. Please, make a client-side solution so they can't shut you off! A browser based plugin, for example that allows us to plot the listings on our end. I wrote this email to craigslist: Hi Craig and Jim, I am very upset that you cut off padmapper. Using padmapper cuts out a lot of the spam that ends up in the apartment listings due to the fact that it doesn't have a lat,long pair most of the time. It also makes it much easier to search for apartments based on your preference. With padmapper, I could see if the apartment I'm looking at is in a safe area, how far it is from a potential employer, and a myriad of other great things. Finding an apartment with craigslist, in spite of the fact that you have the data, is much harder than searching on padmapper. I really wish there was a way you could work with them! You guys are a solid blue chip, no doubt. But if you take this oligarchical perspective to your business, someone is going to beat you eventually. Thank you for your continued service
  • washedup 14y ago
    Great email... I will follow suit. They cut off the listings right in the middle of a search and it took me a little while to figure out what happened.
• Mc_Big_G 14y ago
  This is the whole reason I started foreverlist.com. Besides better/more photos, geolocation, comments, etc..., I always wanted to open up the api and let anyone develop on top of it. Alas, competing with craigslist is folly. I regret cloning the design of CL, but the logic was that it would be simple for people to use. I absolutely LOVE pad mapper and hate craigslist even more now. Many good sites have been killed off by craigslist. [edit spelling]
• raldi 14y ago
  This post could use a new title, unless you want to scare HN'ers into thinking Craigslist is shutting down.
• GigabyteCoin 14y ago
  I expected padmapper to be shut down a long time ago. Mainly because they are an incredible threat to the websites they are scraping all of their data from. That's probably why padmapper has no way of making money at the moment. They were hoping they could slink by, stealing other's content, until they were eventually big enough for people to warrant visiting them to list their apartments for rent. And then sell ads. Don't get me wrong, I love padmapper, but scraping content is scraping content. And it's generally not allowed.
  • ThisIBereave 14y ago
    "stealing other's content" that was completely user generated...
    • GigabyteCoin 14y ago
      So is MLS data in a sense, but good luck copying that data and not getting a letter from their lawyers the very next day. Real estate information is extremely valuable. The massive amount of trust that keeps generating a fresh database of apartments to rent on craigslist is quite valuable to them. Why should they just allow anybody else to copy it for free?
  • ericd 14y ago
    You're right, I was hoping I could go on, but I wasn't stealing anyone's content, I was posting links pasted geographically located with stat summaries. Look at a listing on PadMapper - there's no listing text, and when you click through, it goes to the original listing.
    • GigabyteCoin 14y ago
      My apologies. I may have used some improper wording there. But if I may... you must admit that you have taken "something" from Craigslist. Whatever you want to call it... be it geographical location points, links-to-listings, content, data, images, etc... it is inevitably some form of information that was originally curated by Craigslist through their 10+ years of existence online and is thus available to be used (and not used) at their discretion. Canada Post for example charges $5,500/year (http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/business/productsservices/mailing/pcdp.jsf http://www.canadapost.ca/cpo/mc/business/productsservices/ma...) just to have access to a postal code verification system. It's all publicly available information... if you walked to every city, suburb, nook and cranny in Canada and asked the local people what their postal code is, they would tell you without hesitating. But if Canada Post gets wind that you may have copied any of that publicly available information from their databases instead of doing the hard work yourself, you can expect a lawsuit at your door fairly quickly: http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/13/technology-canada-post-postal-code-copyright.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/story/2012/04/13/technology-... I don't think Canada Post had a case in the above example because the company in question didn't actually copy anything from their database, but you did when scraping Craigslist (for however insignificant you found the information to be), see what I'm saying? Just because you are sending them traffic, doesn't give you the right to take (insert whatever might have been taken here) from them without their permission. That being said, I love padmapper and have used it numerous times already for myself and friends. I wish you all the best going into the future!
• JumpCrisscross 14y ago
  Could Padmapper reform itself as an extremely intrusive browser extension? Is there any evidence CL was pressured by any privacy groups or regulators?
• rdl 14y ago
  Why not buy a license and go hard on mobile? Then use that to get more direct listings, ideally with ACTUAL STRUCTURED DATA unlike the shit that is craigslist (i.e. closer to MLS, or even better, closer to the proprietary systems used inside large real estate investment companies), and then re-release a web version using only those listings. Maybe focus on SFBA only, since the real estate situation is acutely broken here AND smart+rich people still rent here (unlike Texas or the midwest, with NYC being its own weird market).
  • ericd 14y ago
    Maybe, if you want to chat more about this, email me at eric@padmapper.com
• lindablus 14y ago
  PadMapper is like the super helpful feature that craigslist did not figure out how to build correctly, or never bothered to build. I'm disappointed that Craigslist chose to respond by making a great social utility disappear from the market and anger the users. What about charging a license fee? What about acquiring PadMapper? What exactly does Craigslist gain by pulling its index off from PadMapper other than damaging its own public image?
• mhartl 14y ago
  Craigslist is one of the greatest blown opportunities in the history of business.
• product50 14y ago
  If I were at Craigslist, I would strongly look at commercializing their listings. By that I mean charging a fixed amount (say $5) for every 1000 results sent to the requester (such as Padmapper). That ways Craigslist gets to keep the revenue while other companies can innovate on top of the massive data which Craigslist has.
• omarish 14y ago
  Cached version: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://blog.padmapper.com/2012/06/22/bye-bye-craigslist/ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
• cwp 14y ago
  Disappointing. I'm currently living in an apartment I found via Padmapper and Craigslist. Padmapper was absolutely crucial, without it I wouldn't have found this place. I understand why they're complying with the C+D, but I wish they'd fight it. Craigslist is better than printed classifieds, but that's about the best thing you can say about it.
  • iamwil 14y ago
    I think it's harder for small guys like Padmapper to fight them, because 1) There's no money for lawyering 2) Craigslist says that they listen more to users for UI. So if you'd like to see CL give Padmapper license to use its data, send them an email. Your voice as a CL user weight more than Padmapper's would.
• marquis 14y ago
  Could Craiglist shut down every single IP who scrapes? Could you build Padmapper to be less 'realtime' and more 'tell me the city and I'll set up a client-side scraper, come back in 15 minutes?'
• smalter 14y ago
  I'm pretty sure that Craigslist disruption is coming, and it's going to be AirBnB. I'm not too worried. What craigslist is doing (ie, sucking) isn't sustainable.
  • pbreit 14y ago
    Hah, people have been saying that for a decade. What people fail to realize is that Craigslist is ultra successful because of what it does, not despite.
• coreygoodie 14y ago
  Why the hate on Craigslist? It's their information, and are free to do what they want with it - most likely, develop their own platform.
• nickfromseattle 14y ago
  Craigslist is hiring Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineers - maybe they plan on releasing a similar feature? http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sof/2841395914.html http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/sof/2841395914.html
• AceJohnny2 14y ago
  Here's the email I sent to Craigslist. I tried to use the following template: intro (what are we talking about), how padmapper is good for craigslist, why I care about padmapper, course of action. Feel free to reuse it. ---- Hi Jim and Craig, I learned today that Craigslist has sent a Cease and Desist to padmapper.com. Padmapper provides a service to visualize on a map rental listings from sources like Craigslist. Real estate is all about location, and let's be frank, Craigslist's location-based search sucks. Padmapper helps the searcher easily see where real estate is located. It turns a grueling search into a breeze. It adds great value to Craigslist's listings without competing with Craigslist's business. Padmapper, along with Craigslist, were essential in helping me find my current home in the San Francisco Bay Area. Without Padmapper, I wouldn't have used Craigslist in my search. I'm sure you can find a mutually beneficial deal with Padmapper, instead of shutting them out entirely.
• pbreit 14y ago
  I propose that Craigslist has been ultra successful because of its actions, not despite. I think it's success is due both directly to how it has built and operated the site as well as due to the overall mentality that fends off all the lame ideas from the armchair product designers.
• CoffeeDregs 14y ago
  Bummer. I'm completely mystified that CraigsList doesn't have an API. Fortunately, others do: http://3taps.com/ http://3taps.com/ [no affiliation]
• philmcc 14y ago
  Solution/Question: Could the padmapper guy just make an application, which he sells for $10-$15, with the same functionality, except all the "scraping" happens from the user's computer or browser? And if this violates the TOS, assuming I can sell a browser which only visits Craigslist -- then where is the line where a browser does too much "formatting" and becomes a TOS violation?
• kylelibra 14y ago
  For those wishing to take action: jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEO craig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder @jimbuckmaster on twitter - http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster http://twitter.com/jimbuckmaster @craignewmark on twitter - http://twitter.com/craignewmark http://twitter.com/craignewmark Simple email to copy and paste: Jim and Craig, I'm a longtime user of Craigslist, but I'm really disappointed in your decision regarding PadMapper. It would be great if you could weigh in on the debate happening on Hacker News or elsewhere. Thanks,
  • phaus 14y ago
    Good luck, but I doubt it will work. My first experience with craigslist was trying to figure out why they had the capability to block my wife's ad for a free dog that contained a mispelled word while the site's creator was busy trying to tell the government that there was nothing he could do about the many child prostitution ads that appeared on craigslist.
    • gringomorcego 14y ago
      One depends on a spellchecker?
      • phaus 14y ago
        If you can parse text for spelling, surely you can parse text for the sexual exploitation of minors.
        • sltkr 14y ago
          I would think that these ads aren't exactly to-the-point considering what is offered is extremely illegal. I sincerely doubt you could reliably identify them based on keywords alone. If it were so easy to spot child exploitation ads, why doesn't the police or the FBI monitor sites like Craigslist? I'd much rather see the people involved in that filthy business prosecuted than simply having their ads blocked (which doesn't do anything for the victims).
    • 14y ago
• ericd 14y ago
  Hi everyone, Eric from PadMapper here, thanks for all the comments! To everyone saying that this is lifting their content, I disagree - it makes a summary of the content and then points back to the original. If I wanted to lift their stuff, I would have made separate pages that laid things out better than the original. Literally none of the text except the title and location string make it into the summary. It's not a copyright issue, their main legal beef is that it's against their TOU for anything but general search engines to index their content - no vertical ones allowed. Who knows what their actual motivation is.
  • MichaelApproved 14y ago
    Do you think they're shutting you down in preparation of creating their own version of pad paper an releasing that without your competition?
    • ericd 14y ago
      It's possible, they've been looking for a dev with maps experience for a while.
  • minouye 14y ago
    Serious question: Do you think CL would actually follow through with a lawsuit? It seems like they fire off C&D's all the time, but I have yet to see serious follow through.
    • ericd 14y ago
      No idea, but I've done a little bit of looking, and they have a history of attacking pretty aggressively, at least against things that auto-post. Those are mostly tools for spammers, though, so who knows if they'd come after me.
      • gleb 14y ago
        I don't think you are bound by their TOS simply by indexing their site. Whether it makes business sense to test this legal theory is a wholly different question.
• khangtoh 14y ago
  Could the C&D be PadMapper violating the use of the trade mark? http://www.padlister.com/listings/new http://www.padlister.com/listings/new "Better looking, effortless Craigslist Ads."
• eli 14y ago
  I personally would have tried to find a way to work with them. But it's not my site. Craig isn't doing anything wrong or unethical here. Quite the opposite; Craigslist continues to deliver exactly what its users signed up for.
• wilfra 14y ago
  Hi Craig and Jim, I was disappointed to learn you dont want PadMapper to use your listings. Their site and Carsabi are two sites I recently used to find my apartment and car, respectively, only after I had given up on dealing with your firehose and sparse search options. In using both sites I knew full well I was simply using them as a better, more elegant, more feature rich version of CL. Both ultimately referred me right back to your site for specific listings, which was exactly what I wanted them to do. I dig and respect that you guys are staying true to your mission, running a lean company and keeping it simple. I've read all I can find about both of you and how you've built and how you run CL. You are two of my heroes. But you are really betraying your mission and your credibility with this move. You should let your data be completely open. Let people do whatever they want with it. CL is an institution. You are a backbone of the internet. Just like Facebook and how they share their graph with anybody who wants to use it, as it spreads the FB brand everywhere - you should embrace people wanting to use your data. It will only serve to spread the CL brand further and even more important, it will make the lives of people all over the World better. I thought that was what you stood for. I hope you don't prove me wrong. Regards, -Bill
• aninteger 14y ago
  How is this different from when Bing was using Google search results? If people want to use Padmapper great. if people want to use Craigslist then great.. Am I missing something here? I don't see the problem. What if it were the other way around?
• felixchan 14y ago
  Can you open source padmapper so we can run it ourselves? That way, no matter what Craigslist does, people would still be able to use the great service.
  • ericd 14y ago
    Hm, that's kind of an interesting idea. I'd be pretty embarrassed at all the hacks I've added over the years, but I'll definitely keep that in mind.
    • felixchan 14y ago
      hah! I have the same feeling with my stuff.
    • ryanmerket 14y ago
      Yes. Please open source it...
• jacoblyles 14y ago
  Craigslist is an evil monopolist that literally wastes millions of hours of its users time every year through the enforcement of shitty UI (if the amount of money that I save using padmapper is typical). They get a good reputation for some bizarre reason because their CEO is an anti-capitalist, but they are still evil for holding back innovation. A human lifetime is about 700,000 hours. Craigslist is the moral equivalent of a serial killer.
  • DustinCalim 14y ago
    For those who use Chrome web browser, there's some fixes by way of extension that really help save time on CL... My favorite: http://www.craigslistextension.com/ http://www.craigslistextension.com/
• kylek 14y ago
  as someone typing this in the apartment they found via a Craigslist ad on PadMapper (and as someone who has recommended it to several people because of the feature). time for a mobile PadMapper with a proper license for the data? :/
• folktheory 14y ago
  Nooooo! I was going to start looking at places in Padmapper next month, for my upcoming move! Is there any other similar service?
• Alex3917 14y ago
  "They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites." Really? They used to allow any website to use their data for free as long as they didn't run ads against it or monetize it in any way. Kexter.com has been doing exactly what you're doing for almost ten years now.
• cldrope 14y ago
  Craigslist does not allow scraping. Beg for help and for support for breaking their rules elsewhere. This is Hacker News, not "help me retain a business model after I broke rules" central. You could alternatively hire people to spam them with nice requests to reconsider.
• gcb 14y ago
  You already got the traction. Offer something complete now. It's already better.
• philwelch 14y ago
  This is an existential threat to Padmapper. Which is very sad to me, since it's easily one of my favorite sites to search for anything.
• malandrew 14y ago
  Can you please open source all the code specific to craigslist data extraction so that others may incorporate your work into open-source projects?
• yalogin 14y ago
  Could it not mean that they are coming up with some padmapper like functionality? Padmapper of course is the only usable rental search site after craigslist. The rest of them like rent.com and apartments.com are absolute crap. I hope they work something out.
• glenntzke 14y ago
  I'm sad to hear this. I used padmapper to find my place in NYC among an incredibly scam-filled and otherwise difficult to navigate sea of lies and frauds. PM helped me utilize CL in a way their filters could not.
• joshwa 14y ago
  Here's an idea-- why doesn't Craigslist just buy padmapper? They certainly have enough cash to do so.
• lhnn 14y ago
  I get that CL has a fast UI that is very easy to understand for non-technical users. But why can't they somehow work with others who want to improve the experience? There have been several sites that I have personally used to aggregate searches, eliminate duplicates, filter on different attributes, etc. that all were better for me than CL. (Craiglook, padmapper, etc.) Every, time, CL flips them off and threatens suit. FFS, guys, just strike a deal with some of these devs and make a 'tech-friendly' portal for people who want actual search capability from your site.
• dap 14y ago
  I'm surprised how many people here are defending Craigslist. They've got a history of both providing a terrible experience for apartment seekers and shutting down any attempts to use their data to provide a better experience. That would be okay in a competitive market, but they've got a strong monopoly in a market with a high barrier to entry. They're playing the textbook role of an evil monopolist.
  • chrisguitarguy 14y ago
    Craigslist is a company whose terms of service were violated by PadMapper. Whether or not PadMapper provides a better experience is irrelevant: Craigslist has a right to defend its content and lists by whatever means it sees fit. Any businessperson on this site would expect to have the same rights. Craigslist is not in the business of helping anyone but Craigslist be successful. It's not monopoly; it's business.
    • dap 14y ago
      Companies are not free to do whatever they want. The government compels monopolists to avoid anticompetitive behavior, and even breaks companies up, for examples. The market in this case is a little hard to define, since apartment seekers aren't purchasing the product, so I'm sure it's not actually illegal, but it sure seems to violate the spirit of these laws, which are designed to protect consumers from exactly this kind of behavior.
• jbarham 14y ago
  FWIW Craigslist is a ghost town in Australia and virtually useless for buying & selling the type of stuff I used it for frequently when I lived in California. For example here's the furniture for sale section for Melbourne: http://melbourne.craigslist.com.au/fua/ http://melbourne.craigslist.com.au/fua/. Seems that in Australia people use Gumtree.com.au or even ebay.com.au for online classifieds.
  • beedogs 14y ago
    gumtree is where it's at for apartment rentals and other big hard-to-ship odds and ends. then there's carsales.com.au for automobiles, and ebay for everything else. seems to work out okay.
• nickgeiger 14y ago
  >> They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites. PadMapper already has an app so couldn't they continue to use the listings in the app?
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• phear 14y ago
  Once read about how its a bad idea to base the core of your business around someone else's platform. Once they(and their lawyers) decide to re-evaluate your relationship with them it can nearly destroy what you've built. Testament to this are the number of apps based on twitter that died when twitter decided to up their offering and cover what they were doing. How to do it well is Zynga's relationship with Facebook The people at PadMapper are doing a good thing looking for other sources but like the author said Craiglist was/is an important source of pad listings. All the best to them
• maked00 14y ago
  Let me guess your young and your pathetic education taught you very little, and your sheltered life made you think everything would be handed you on a silver platter. Instead of whining, you either need to offer large sums of cash to CL, or some deal. CL does not owe you a living. Your crappy little app is just skimming the cream off the top of CL's infrastructure and you expect CL to give you a free ride? Not going to happen. You are simply lucky you got away with it as long as you did.
• maked00 14y ago
  Just read the entire thread, got to be one of the most sock-puppet, straw-manned, astro-turfed, meat-puppeted mess of self serving wanna be entreprenuer whining ever. CL is successful, get over it.
  • jps359 14y ago
    You're absolutely correct.
• jarnix 14y ago
  I found this : http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/06/22/padmapper-craigslist-cease-and-desist/ http://m.techcrunch.com/2012/06/22/padmapper-craigslist-ceas... So no it was not bye bye.
• PythonDeveloper 14y ago
  Total BS Craig... You should be REWARDING innovation, not joining the cadre of douchebag trolls that try to kill it.
• MitziMoto 14y ago
  Craigslist needs to be stopped. This is the third incredibly useful service I've seen shutdown in as many weeks. I was heartbroken when Carsabi had to stop indexing Craigslist a couple weeks ago.
• eibrahim 14y ago
  How about all the ipad apps that access craigslist data? how do they get away with that???
• enobrev 14y ago
  CL is obviously in their full rights to do so, but I really wish they could have waited a couple weeks before they did it. I'm moving to another state this Tuesday and PM is especially helpful when you don't know the neighborhoods.
• jblock 14y ago
  Sometimes people seem to forget that the most frequent users of Craigslist, and the ones that keep it popular, are not complaining about it having bad UX. We are. I want PadMapper to succeed (it helped me find a place super-quick for grad school in the fall), but Craigslist has every right to legislate their content. We'll see what they do/don't do about it.
• swayfm 14y ago
  Counting down for a new wave of PadMapper clones / CL scrapers to start popping up.
• smashingeeks 14y ago
  Craiglist sucks, and even other site of the category. This idea of selling things based on location isn't that bad but Craiglist presents the site which is badly interfaced.