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Craigslist posts shown on a map while viewing Craigslist housing
- untog 14y agoCool idea. Will be interesting to see what companies like Craigslist can/will do about this stuff. It's not like Craigslist is ideologically opposed to maps, they just didn't want them to be hosted on a competing site. So I imagine they might not mind this at all..
- benblodgett 14y agoI agree a good work around for the padmapper problem, wonder how padmapper will react.
- ericd 14y agoI'm the person who made PadMapper, I think this is great. I'm worried that CL doesn't distinguish, though. (I'm a bit confused as to why you think I'd have a problem with it, did you mean to type Craigslist there?)
- chuinard 14y agoBecause it turns your entire platform / service into a Chrome widget and eliminates the need for your product?
- jack-r-abbit 14y ago... eliminates the need for his product only by people who are into using Chrome plugins like that. The rest of the people looking for apartments will still have a need for his product. I wonder which user base would be bigger. I suspect it is not the Chrome Plugin users.
- ericd 14y agoI think it's a cool solution. I want apartment hunting to be less awful, I don't necessarily have to be the one to do it.
- ryanhuff 14y agoThere is nothing that prevents this Chrome widget from becoming as threatening to CL as was padmapper.
- gms7777 14y agoYep. While its cool, most people apartment shop for max a few weeks per year? I don't know about others, but I tend to avoid installing anything that has a single purpose and limited use, even if its free, because I don't like being cluttered with apps and widgets and extensions and the like. If the general public is anything like me, a website is far more inviting than something like this.
- welder 14y agoSome people will use it. Maybe not as many as PadMapper, but I developed CLMapper with myself as the ideal user.
- sillysaurus 14y agoHey there. Somewhat offtopic, but: thank you for shaking up an old industry by creating Padmapper. Kudos.
- ericd 14y agoThanks :-)
- welder 14y agoditto, PadMapper is the sh*t! It has saved me countless hours of apartment hunting. Thanks!
- ericd 14y agoThanks, and nice work yourself :-)
- jmccaffrey 14y agoMuch love for PadMapper. I'll miss it man...I even recommended it to my landlord so he can track neighborhood apartment prices better (for rent adjustment)
- ericd 14y agoHaha cool. No need to miss it, it's still there.
- jusben1369 14y agoWhat Sillysaurus said. I'm still confused by a) this is one area CL makes revenue b) Your service makes it more usable thus increasing demand = c) more revenue to offset any costs associated with load?
- chimi 14y agoI think some tend to think you are on a mission to prove a point or make money and have a popular site, slightly contrary to your stated position of just benevolently wanting to make craigslist apartment hunting better, so this could take your traffic and set you off the mission they really think you are on.
- hyperbovine 14y agoI use a Chrome extension that automatically displays the embedded photos as thumbnails next to each listing. Per request, it probably increases the resource burden on CL's servers by one or two orders of magnitude. I can't imagine they are happy about that and keep waiting for the day when they implement some sort of rate limiting. 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.
- degenerate 14y agoWhat extension? I was just looking for something like this.
- hyperbovine 14y agohttps://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgnfeecolmmcgocefnf https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/jmcbgcbedienblgnfe...
- electronous 14y agoI like this. It's interesting that a viable solution to the Craigslist third party problem is to just make everybody scrape Craigslist. From a purely technical standpoint, that seems rather unfortunate, but I'd rather have a local scraper + Padmapper UI than have no Padmapper at all.
- ericd 14y agoNeat. I have heard of CL C&Ding some extensions as well, but it may have just been a subset of extensions that were doing something they didn't like.
- dclowd9901 14y agoYou mean like overloading their servers with needless scraping?
- hnriot 14y agoThere's no reason to assume this will overload CL servers or CDN.
- cadwag 14y agoLocal client-side scraping of CG to bring about similar results to Padmapper - I like it. 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?
- marquis 14y agoI had the idea that browser clients could scrape content as they browse then send that anonymously to a central system that could be used by all, but with the copyright issue now in play it seems that it would give CL due process to shut down such a service.
- chintan 14y agohttp://housingmaps.com http://housingmaps.com - the mothership - how do they still exist?
- ghshephard 14y agoThey aren't trying to use Craigslist to jumpstart their own business - they are simply offering a service to users, so CL is fine with them. 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.
- MartinCron 14y agoPadmapper's eventual goal is to destroy CL What? I don't think that's ever been Padmapper's goal.
- flatline3 14y agoIt is the unavoidable end-game if padmapper is successful.
- ericd 14y agoI think I have some say in the end-game for PadMapper, no?
- flatline3 14y agohttp://www.padlister.com/ http://www.padlister.com/ - "PadLister is a full suite of tools for renting" 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.
- ebun 14y agoFYI, http://www.housingmaps.com/ http://www.housingmaps.com/ is still a decent CL housing + Map mashup
- deltaqueue 14y agoAs are http://mapliv.com http://mapliv.com and https://www.padmapper.com/ https://www.padmapper.com/
- chimi 14y agoIn the end, client side scraping of the data actually increases the traffic on CL's servers, because multiple people have to scrape the same posts, rather than a central server. If padmapper remained small, then they probably scrape more posts than they have unique views. Of the 100 they scrape, maybe only 10 are seen. As padmapper et al grow, it may reduce the bandwidth on cl. 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.
- jack-r-abbit 14y agoNot only that, but for every housing page with a list on it, the scraper is going to pull all those pages to parse the data and display on a map. I suspect a person who is doing a lot of apartment hunting with this extension runs the risk of just getting their IP address banned. I assume CL has that capability.
- loumf 14y agoI think CL is worried that their bandwidth would start going down as people start putting their apartment listings in PadMapper instead of CL because CL doesn't have any apartment listings any more.
- welder 14y agoSince users will be browsing the CL website, CL will still control the distribution of their content. I'm betting tech details are just details as long as users are browsing the CL website.
- reustle 14y agoI was very close to making a bookmarklet / extension like this, but I'd rather see padmapper succeed.
- adrianwaj 14y agoWould be great if it worked for cities outside of the US.. the ones I tested (even in English) did not. Map stayed centered on California.
- welder 14y agoI've just pushed the full source code to github: https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper If you find issues or have feature suggestions, please add them and I will push fixes: https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/issues https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/issues
- efuquen 14y agoThis is not working for New York for me, didn't show up at all, but it was definitely working in Gainesville, FL (where I'm at now), popped up right away. Are there certain cities it will not function in, for whatever reason?
- welder 14y agoIt works for: http://newyork.craigslist.org/hhh/ http://newyork.craigslist.org/hhh/ but newyork.craigslist.org has housing categories different from sfbay.craigslist.org and a Chrome extension's client script only runs on the pages which match the manifest.json: https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/blob/master/src/manifest.json https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper/blob/master/src/mani... I'll add the newyork urls to the manifest.
- dredmorbius 14y agoIt'll be interesting to see how CL views this in light of section 5 of their TOU: 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. http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use Would CL really want to sue its users though?
- kirubakaran 14y agoPlus he has open sourced it now https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper
- netfire 14y agoIsn't a user's browser technically an intermediary? The browser reads html from an initial request and makes automated additional requests for images, javascript and css files, etc and then renders the page using its own rendering engine. The only difference here is that the browser is making multiple requests and using a different rendering engine (the extension) to display it using a map. 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.
- joe_the_user 14y agoI don't think this is aimed at users at all but at what padmapper was doing - using an intermediary to copy CL data.
- rubing 14y agopad mapper is much better than this. this doesn't work well at all. i look for housing in LA, but b/c one of the listings is in WA it zooms out and makes it difficult to zoom back in. and if you click on a listing your back to the zoomed out default focus when done with it. THIS NEEDS A LOT OF WORK!!!