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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Curious if Live Lovely (http://livelovely.com/) will get a similar cease and desist. They do essentially the exact same thing, but with a nicer design.
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.
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.
>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.
"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"
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!
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.
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.
>> Yeah but that still sucks, because people rarely know which neighborhood they are in.
"rarely" is a tough word. I have found the city to be pretty well demarcated unless you are talking about people confused about minor issues such as what counts as Lower Haight and what counts as Upper Haight.
>> I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.
I used Padmapper as a newbie to the city but quickly found that the latency between postings on CL and the corresponding crawled updates on Padmapper were so high that the postings would have already been hit by a few dozen responses by the time I got it and in a hyper-competitive housing market like SF, this made all the difference.
If you're looking on the Peninsula, where school districts and crime levels vary by street within the same time, Padmapper is vastly better than craigslist.
I mean, look at all the misleading fucking tools who post "Palo Alto apartment for $1k/mo" which is actually in EAST PALO ALTO. With padmapper, it is clear. (In Menlo Park, where some areas are unincorporated, some are Menlo Park, some are Menlo Park but a warzone (Belle Haven, aka EPA North), etc., it's even more essential).
In Boston, every listing is contaminated with mentions of every single nearby neighborhood to take advantage of Craigslist's comically broken search functionality. Search "back bay", and you end up with listings in Somerville, since it's "NEAR BACK BAY SOUTH END CAMBRIDGE BROOKLINE" etc etc etc.
Apartment hunting on Craigslist is a total nightmare without Padmapper, and I'm resenting Craigslist more and more for relegating us all to using their horrible UI.
I've always recommended padmapper to friends moving to NYC, it has never let me down. We'll see how it goes from here, hopefully people will just start submitting directly on their site.
This is about the 3000th time I've read that phrase, or some variation of it, in the past ten years. If that were true then it would have happened already, no? Markets can fail in the short term, but in space as crowded with upstarts as the web, I just don't buy it over such a long period of time.
The thing I like most about Craigslist is that some guy made it just to help other people out. The thing I dislike most about all the people trying to "disrupt" Craigslist is that they're clearly in it for the money. I feel like this non-trivial selling point is lost on those who swear that CL is broken and needs replacing.
Yeah, I really don't think Craigslist needs disruption, it's mostly perfect for what it does. It's just for really complex/rare/non-commodity things like housing and cars where I think it needs some help.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/) 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)?
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.
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.
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.
Because Craigslist is a monopolist with no real competitive pressures. Their CEO and founder are also crunchy anti-capitalists who take pride in being luddites. This endears them to much of the left-wing, San Francisco tech crowd, but their shitty UI combined with monopoly power wastes dozens of human lives worth of user hours every year.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which paradoxically, seems to be an advantage, because it puts people in a feedback loop where they stay on the site, and every new search provides a tiny bit of reinforcement that builds the habit.
Failing to find what you're looking for because of a frustrating UI is not positive reinforcement. People stay on the site because it is the largest marketplace and they have no alternatives.
That's weird, I've never had any trouble finding what I was looking for on Craigslist. There definitely are ways that they could improve the search interface, but the current implementation works fine for me, and given their user base it works well enough for a lot of people.
Their magic recipe is that an amazing amount of non-technical people have figured out how to work with the site.
The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament.
They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement.
It's almost surreal to look at their site (http://marktplaats.nl) and realize that there's tons of highly talented people behind it.
Despite the very basic UI, the Dutch version of Craigslist seems to be doing well based on the hundreds of apartment listings in, for example, Amsterdam:
Can you believe that there are just 5 apartment listings for a metropolitan area of 19.9 million!
It's incomprehensible to me why Craigslist doesn't work there, especially since all the alternatives involve paying some middleman for listing. The same goes for job sites and "things for sale" sites as well. Brazilians prefer to use some scammy-looking sites loaded with graphics and eye candy and often charging a fee, rather than the vanilla Craigslist.
I'm going to venture a guess that this has much more to do with trust (Brazilians want to feel that someone has vetted the data) than with good/bad UI or web design.
There are various examples of Craiglist just simply not working in various countries. In fact I'm going to go out on a limb and posit that Craigslist really only had a monopoly in the U.S. Brazil uses olx (I think?), Argentina and Mexico among other Latin American countries use mercadolibre where Craigslist is more for baiting foreigners with higher rent prices and international shared accomodation. Australia has gumtree, New Zealand has trademe (and they both use Seek for jobs) and I would use marktplaats in the Netherlands as mentioned above. I forget the one for Spain. The list goes on..
'alister' made some good points up top. Let me get further into the rental side of the subject.
As someone who, on many occasions, has rented in Brazil using classifieds sites, it's a mess. 'We' really, really need a CL-type site that everyone knows and uses. As a Californian, and former user of CL, it boggles my mind why CL-Brazil isn't used. It's there (here), it's usable, simple, and in Portuguese.
Instead, people use OLX (free) a little, Vivastreet (free) a little, EasyQuarto (paid) a little, and a few other sites that are either less popular or only work sometimes. Couchsurfing city-specific groups usually each have a sub-group for renting but a strange occurrence takes place there, almost no one puts the price-point. It's called doing business, paying money for a product or service, yet there's a real aversion to giving up the rental price in one's ad. Luckily, the more popular sites I mentioned make it so one has to list their rental price.
And my final two gripes are that very few people respond to inquiries into any particular ad (I think this is universal though) and a good 60% of ads here in Brazil only want women renters.
Same here in France. It looks like the only ads on fr.craigslist.com are either posted by americans living in France (they're allin english) or spam.
I have never heard of anyone buying/selling stuff on craigslist among my friends/relatives.
Yup, there's a catch-22 here: when your site has shitty usability but is the only source of information, people hit more pages and spend more time there. When you fix your UI mistakes, they're in and out quicker because they actually get what they need efficiently. Because you're optimizing for engagement by measuring time on site or something like that, you end up making sure never to make your site easy to use.
This is not a recipe for success. It's a symptom of measuring the wrong metric, especially when you have a near monopoly on a market due to network effects. If this is really why Craigslist is not improving their UI, they need to hire some analysts that actually know WTF they're doing.
I can tell you from first-hand experience that they know what they're doing. They measure almost everything, nicely put together in dashboards with all the KPI's for the appropriate managers.
I think it's unlikely they used a suboptimal performance indicator to judge the site's new design, and would say the same thing about craigslist.
Haha, I see what you did there. You confused UI with Usability. Craigslist is incredibly usable. Have you taken a look at Ebay lately? Does it look familiar? That's cos it hasn't significantly changed in 10 years. Is that because they don't care? Nope, it's because gradients and drop shadows make your product look better, but don't make it more usable.
Craigslist is a utility, not a website. They care about keeping it useful not only for users today, but for users in 10 years. That's not something startups care about at all. Startups are looking to amass users and then sell. Craigslist cares not about such goals.
Go ahead, get mad at their inflexibility. But then take a step back and think about what craigslist represents. And then wonder if you yourself would have the cajones to stick to your guns in todays startup market. I for one commend their ability to keep their product strong in the face of all the bells and whistles of web 2.0 or whatever it's called these days.
I disagree, craigslist sucks. It's filled with spam and it's searching and sorting options could be way better.
The only reason they don't have many competitors is because they have an information/platform monopoly. Just like many other tech companies, ebay and facebook come to mind as obvious examples.
I couldn't care less what Craigslist LOOKS like, but its usability is profoundly broken in some areas (Denver Metro, for example).
The problem is that there's a Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins Craigslist. For those of you in the Bay Area, that would be roughly like having a distinct San Francisco, San Rafael, San Jose, and Santa Cruz Craigslist. If you're in between those places, which one do you look at? You have to look at more than one. Even if you're IN one of those places, which one do you look at? Sometimes three or four, if it's something you're willing to drive an hour to buy.
And if you're POSTING, where do you post? If you post a popular item to Boulder (because, say, you live in Boulder), then people in the next town over who only know about Denver won't see it, so you also have to post to Denver if you want everyone in a reasonable radius to see your item. Which means you have to violate Craigslist policies AND mess with your listing enough to get past its spam filter.
The sad thing is they've fixed it to the 80% level in the Bay Area, where the whole (extended!) Bay Area (even Santa Cruz, which isn't really Bay Area) is on a single Craigslist site with sub-area filters, but they just leave it broken here.
THIS is a usability problem.
And honestly so is the lack of "map these results," for times when you want to see which ones are closest, or which ones you could stop by on your way to work, or whatever.
It's not because it's not shiny or doesn't have gradients or drop shadows. It's because key features that I want from a classified site are sorely lacking.
Just because the site is simple in design, doesn't mean that it is built to be used efficiently. Craigslist, as is, is a usability nightmare. When I use the site, I am using it with various Greasemonkey scripts, Firefox extensions and 3rd party web apps to make their content easier to consume/see/understand/filter. These tools are the only reason that I can bare to use Craigslist.
If I am searching for a bike, a simple script to show image thumbnails by every listing will let me see which listings interest me. This saves me time, because now I only have to open a few interesting links. I don't have to scour through many of text links, just to see if they interest me.
The rentals section is constantly bombarded by spam and has very few filtering options. There is no way to exclude keywords. Boolean operators would greatly improve the usability of the site.
You can exclude keywords and there is a boolean OR operator: |
The problem is that you have to enter some search query before you can use the negation operator.
Also, protip to get past the spam in rentals section (Austin is holy crap bad about this): enter 'google' as your search term. This will only return ads that have an address specified and hence have the 'google maps' links. Plus, since you've entered a search term, you can filter out the locator who keeps spamming and screwing up your search by putting his phone number in the address section.
Here's a query I might have used during my last apartment search.
google downtown | central -"512-555-5555" -"CALL NOW" -"austin apartments NOW"
Keep in mind 95% of their site is not the product they are trying to sell. It is in craigslist's best interest to keep users glued to their site. If someone takes 30 minutes to find a used bike instead of five then great. Maybe there is a chance the user get's bored of cruising bike listings or on one of their many trips to see the latest postings will click on the job section. Craigslist uses their massive user base on the free portion of their site as a significant competitive advantage over all other job posting sites. It is actually in their best interest to make it harder for users to find what they want. Craigslist is not in the business of people selling stuff to each other, they are in the business of attracting enough eyeballs for enough time to their site to click on enough job listings to keep their revenues flowing. They have absolutely no incentive to change or improve. I am pretty sure when they look at their revenues (the ultimate metric), it is actually doing pretty well.
That makes sense. I think a lot of folks advocate maps and filter sliders because they over-estimate an average user's comfort level with such advanced features. I think a non-technical person is much more content with spending several times more time just sifting through listings manually instead of having to learn some whiz-bang (in their mind) gadget.
> 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.
So when can we expect to see your show HN: Craiglist done right?
Building the right interface is simple. The real problem of building any marketplace is solving the chicken/egg problem of having a lot of buyers and sellers.
Craigslist does not avoid disruption because it has the best product, it avoids disruption because it has a huge marketplace with a lot of buyers and sellers.
Other good examples of these content-over-form sites are 2ch.net in japan, and 4chan for the western world. (4chan recently updated its HTML for the first time in something like eight years.)
I suppose network effects (and the posting model) make up a large part of their popularity, but there's something to be said for a reliable and functional interface that works well and doesn't change on a whim.
It's constant in hn discourse to put great UI up there and to give advice on it.
Yet if anyone here has sat on a Bloomberg terminal, used Craigslist, or even games like net hack or dwarf fort, it's pretty clear that interface can be damned.
Not in all cases perhaps, agreed. But in these cases, after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway.
> after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway.
Jared Spool has said that when you change the user interface - fairly dramatically - you frustrate your regular users because they are now unfamiliar with it and have to restart their learning/experience curve.
"At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don't like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background.
Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back."
Honestly thinking about other sites, digg died because of content, reddit survives because of content; even if someone could improve the interface, its not really going to matter.
It's interesting to consider digg... the canonical reason for its death (CEO replaced within a week, 40% of staff laid off two months later) was Digg-v4, a graphical overhaul that also removed features.
Google is definitely content over interface (most of the time). Facebook... not so much - millions of people join protest petitions against every minor interface change - but the value of having all your friends together is still so much greater than the alternative of changing service, whereas reddit was a short step away for digg users.
4chan definitely remains popular because of content - canv.as, a similar project by the same owner, has nowhere near the traction despite being more demographically targeted for mass-market appeal.
I think the lesson is, if you have a close-enough competitor and a fickle userbase, one screwup is all it takes to push critical mass over the edge. If i ran a large website i would study the Digg-v4 case very carefully. Going back to Craigslist, i don't think they have to worry too much about losing their top spot just yet.
Wow, if this is true I've lost a lot of respect for CL. Being scared to make forward changes because one doesn't know the source of success is such a terrible excuse to stop innovating.
Content not available for licensing is a justification for infringement? That doesn't ring true at all for me - exclusive content is often much more valuable to a business than content that's licensed. I doubt anyone would think that goldman sachs coverage being distributed by morgan stanley would fit under some "no harm, no foul" ethos even if Morgan significantly improved on the layout of the pages.
This is unfortunately an increasingly common viewpoint. See for example the recent "Take My Money, HBO" site where people justify pirating the content because HBO won't sell episodes/seasons directly to them.
While I agree with you that taking something somebody isn't selling is wrong, it is still a force any content creator must come to terms with if they want to be realistic about 21st century content creation.
The difference here is that CL still has the content. We always end up in the same fruitless discussion with different subjects: software patents, content, digital media. Should you be able to own something if copying it is practically free? The only right answer is "no", but nobody likes it.
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?
What utter bs - padmapper is not "stealing" anything - padmapper is the best method of viewing cl housing listings there is.
I berated Craig over on Quora about this a while back - to say that he doesn't want to break it is bullshit - he is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates.
The fact that "this posting has been deleted by its author" and "this post has been flagged for removal" still show up in results is down right infuriating.
Providing simply no way to browse items by picture is also laughable.
The content on CL is what is valuable, and Craig has been rumored to make 25 million per year off the site, and he doesn't want to muck with it because he doesn't want to hurt that income - but while doing so, he is keeping the content locked up in an abhorrent UX.
> [Craig] is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates.
I'd be the same. Why mess with a goose that's already laying more gold eggs than you can use? For public service reasons maybe, but I'm confident CL is a (highly profitable) business foremost.
You just answered your own question. If your project made 25 million per year, would you change it? I know I wouldn't... Additionally, he is keeping the data locked up because that is his prerogative. Why should he go through the time and expense of developing some kind of API if he does not want to do that? If he is happy with how the website looks and works right now, why in the blue blazes should he change it?
If this is true, then he (Craig Newmark) really needs to read the innovator's dilemma (http://www.amazon.com/The-Innovators-Dilemma-Revolutionary-B...). TLDR: If you allow yourself to become a prisoner to your success, you're actually making your continued success unlikely. You can solve the dilemma by spinning out a smaller, irreverant version of yourself & giving them what they need to destroy the old company.
In craigslist's case, he could include a link on the old site that allows users to upgrade to a more modern version, and have the modern site basically consume an api/scrape the old CL till it gained momentum.
Padmapper doesn't make money from Craigslist listings.
It also sends traffic back to CL. It shows the summary of the listing, and then when the user is interested, they can click through the pin to the actual Craigslist listing.
Most landlords probably never even realize the traffic first got to CL through Padmapper at all. Whenever I'm asked, I automatically just say CL. Bringing up Padmapper is just likely to confuse.
CL is deliberately making its service less useful both to its paying customers and the public at large. And the sole justification for this is fear that Padmapper could grow to be a bigger, better competitor someday in the distant future.
Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress for fear of future competition is irksome.
It's almost certainly not illegal, and maybe not even morally wrong. But it still sucks.
Yet for all that, I'm moving on July 15th, and I think there's about a 95% chance I'll find the place through CL. That's where the market is.
How does "Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress" not fall under some antitrust laws? Is it just because Craigslist is free? I definitely feel the consumer is potentially losing out due to Craigslist's monopolistic practices.
CL isn't US Steel. I doubt Craigslist even has a straight 40% of rental market share. But for urban 20-somethings looking for cheap living situations and roommates? It feels like it has 95% market share. At least in Portland.
This is all theorycraft though. If anyone had hard numbers on CL's market share for rentals I'd love to see them!
Bah. Just because improve a web site is hard doesn't mean that you don't have a responsibility to your users to TRY. Craigslist has not. There are ways to experiment in a low-impact way. Hell, they could offer a "plugin" system, so that users could add the padmapper plugin.
People keep building things using Craigslist data that users LOVE and Craigslist keeps shutting them down.
Craigslist is one of the great squandered opportunities for awesomeness on the internet.
I would still conjecture that Craigslist succeeded in spite of their design, not because of it. That's the problem with these things, it's really hard to reverse engineer a success like Craigslist and figure out which of the moving pieces were real contributors.
People come back because craigslist has monopoly power. Craigslist knows this. They are afraid to release an API that would allow people to experiment with UI because they know that would train people to go to sites other than craigslist (I save hours using padmapper over Craigslist).
You would think that they'd be able to measure these things. How hard can your flavor of a/b testing (or bandit testing for the bros) be to implement for a company like Craig's list.
It's just pure laziness and I'm sure the right talented team could make a product that beats Craig's list
It's hard for me to see this as stealing content since:
1) Padmapper shows the original craigslist page when you click through to the details page.
2) Padmapper doesn't seem to be monetizing itself in any obvious way, at least not directly through ads on content.
3) Craigslist doesn't monetize its content through ads, anyway.
Essentially all it offers is a wrapper that lowers the friction to discovery. You know, like those kids over at Google. Or Bing. Or DuckDuckGo. Are they stealing content?
The difference is that the search engines aggregate from the whole web, PadMapper was just appropriating content from CL, which is against their TOS. It's very clearly spelled out.
All the other companies that have tried have also been told to C&D. If you don't like it, start your own network...
"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."
PadMapper gets content from more than just Craigslist. They have their own postings (padlister.com), sublet.com, apartments.com, apartmentfinder.com and a lot more. There's really not that much difference between them and a search engine.
I've heard this argument many times before, it was the same with Oodle, but PadMapper's business model is to aggregate apartment listings (Google's is not) and this is in contradiction to the TOS so inevitably Craig Newmark sends them a C&D letter.
Several innovative solutions have been invented over the years, the most obvious one is to do the CL scraping on the client, this way there is no indexing server to block, it's just the client reading all the search listings, parsing them and offering faceted filters. It breaks the spirit of the TOS but it would be impossible for CL to block. I am not advocating this, just pointing out one of the many approaches that have been attempted over the years.
The immediately following text in the CL ToS reads:
As a limited exception, general purpose Internet search engines and noncommercial public archives will be entitled to access craigslist without individual written agreements executed with CL that specifically authorize an exception to this prohibition if, in all cases and individual instances: (a) they provide a direct hyperlink to the relevant craigslist website, service, forum or content; (b) they access craigslist from a stable IP address using an easily identifiable agent; and (c) they comply with CL's robots.txt file ...
PadMapper obeys robots.txt's, for the record. Also, it doesn't repost their content, it reposts facts about the content, which is a pretty key difference.
They've had an informal amnesty for services using their stuff for a long time, Craig has stated that they're OK with services that interface with them as long as they don't use many server resources, but they recently updated their TOU and started sending out huge waves of C&D's a few weeks ago, based on my talking with people.
What a silly analogy. If I have a car and you steal it from me, you now have a car and I don't. What PadMapper does is it takes a picture of my car and shows/sells it to people. Analogies require handling with care :-)
Kika's analogy is also incorrect. What PadMapper does is takes a picture of information like a book, recipe, source code, etc. and then posts it on the Internet so that people can consume the information without going to Craigslist's website.
This is without the permission of Craigslist or of the original submitter or the content.
Without going to the craigslist this information is vastly incomplete. You just see where the property is. Then you click through to the craigslist website. Well, I haven't used PM for a while, but when I was renting it was that way.
Please note that there was no analogy in my original comment. I was merely summing up the OP's argument. Additionally, as someone who has plans to write a craigslist-centric app, and took the time to read the TOS, I find it idiotic for a developer to charge ahead with creating an app/site without either understanding the terms, or obeying them.
What's more is that you are arguing against the notion that whoever creates the content (or own's the content) has the right to decide what gets done with that content. And no matter how much you dislike what they are doing with their content (ie. not creating a shiny interface to access said content), that does NOT give you the right to use that content without permission. It is my understanding that craigslist often gives out permissions to use it's content, and it would appear as though this company didn't bother to secure that permission.
Agreed. Housing, where location is easily the most important factor, is where Craigslist is least usable as a product. Padmapper's success is a testament to Craigslist's users wanting something better. This is a big middle finger to all those users.
Doubly agreed. With Padmapper you could tell whether or not the apartment you found was cheap because it was truly a good deal or just in the ghetto. Very useful in the bay area :)
Network effect. Sellers go to CL because that's where the buyers are, and buyers go to CL because that's where the sellers are. Other features come in play after that. Once the network effect sets in it's almost impossible to unseat the incumbent: eBay, Linked-in, Facebook, Craigslist, etc. The dominant company has 90%+ share, and can stay that way forever doing very little.
eBay, for example, hasn't changed its (rather mediocre) interface in years, and managed to alienate at least some sellers with their policies. And yet, no one managed to make a dent in eBay's position.
Network effect is the reason there is funding for a million social network start-ups. Everyone wants to capture it. But the odds of success, on the other hand, are also one in a million.
I believe there was a post recently on HN where someone pointed out how these things work - one day it just takes off. Some combination of factors (three out of 100, perhaps) gets right and people flock to the site. And then the fate is sealed. Even in retrospect it's often impossible to say what factors were the key. So, I wouldn't be surprised if founders of Craigslist have little clue as to why it worked.
I'd be really really interested to see what it takes for someone to unseat Craigslist (or eBay, or any other major network).
I think there's more to it than that. I know people for whom craigslist is one of the very few websites they interact with. It's a very different demographic from the one that hangs on HN. I think this is a big factor in the CL design and the reluctance to change it.
I also think the network effect is being overstated in this instance. eBay has much stronger lock-in because I can't list my item in more than one auction at a time. But I can certainly list my apartment in more than one service.
I already check the local paper in addition to CL when looking for an apartment. If I'm looking for a bargain, I'm fine with shopping around.
If you don't think Craigslist has an insanely strong network effect, you haven't been thinking about this long/hard enough. Why do you think it's one of the very few websites those people interact with? It's not just because it's simple (though that helps a lot). It's that a) everyone uses it and b) it has everything you could want. It means you don't have to remember 50 random websites, one for each vertical.
I may be in the minority in Silicon Valley, but I'm honestly a really big fan of Craigslist, even despite their C&D'ing me, and I don't think it could or should be "disrupted". I think it's perfect for most of the things on there: lightning fast, few restrictions, community driven. I think it's massively better than that other alternative of having a ton of small websites that each do one thing well, but differently. I shop for new stuff almost exclusively via Amazon for the same reason that I shop exclusively on CL for used stuff.
I think CL works because to most end users, it's really no different than newspaper classifieds. Classified users expect to have to wade through a bunch of useless stuff to find the diamonds in the rough.
couldn't agree more.
i've tried to write my own scraper in the past to make the search more usable (at least show photos from each post next to the link so that i don't have to click through to every single link to see what pieces are for sale) and i was quickly blocked. keep in mind this was not a public site viewed by 100's of people. it was me making one search worth of individual link requests a couple times. blocked. its craigslist way or nothing.
Craigslist, Plenty Of Fish plus some others are examples of sites that took a really minimalist approach to design but managed to pull in a massive market share through fulfilling a customer need. Revenue from advertising paid the bills.
We wrote about ugly design before, how in some cases it actually increases conversion rates. It's odd but sometimes ugly is beautiful...
They created a product that was against their TOS. It's pretty simple really.
If they are doing a great job and are so much better than CL then no doubt everyone will come back and use their site now they have the realtors on board.
I dislike people hating on another company for having a crappy product, just make a better one and compete against them, if they really are that bad then whatever network lock-in they have wont last.
You can't argue they are crap, then try and use them to monetise your own product.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I used it to find an apartment in Vancouver. Still, I have a hard time finding sympathy for somebody that posts something on a public web site, and expects it to remain private.
While I appreciate the sentiment, it is very unlikely that a landlord would object to an apartment listing being aggregated so as to expose it to more users.
If padmapper wants the data why don't they just obtain consent from the CL posters, instead of copying it without consent.
How do you propose padmapper do that without violating the Craigslist TOS in some other way like bulk-emailing everyone who lists an apartment?
I'm not saying their conduct wasn't a bit of a grey area, against the TOS and maybe a copyright violation, but I don't think many Craigslist users would object personally to their posts being reposted in this manner.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
311 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 273 ms ] threadWe 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.
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.
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.
I really hope PadMapper can make up the volume but continue to have good results for people searching. It's a wonderful resource.
On a more related note, I would imagine any sites like this that come up on Craigslist's radar will get a similar notice.
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.
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.
Why do they deserve access?
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"
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!
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.
I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.
"rarely" is a tough word. I have found the city to be pretty well demarcated unless you are talking about people confused about minor issues such as what counts as Lower Haight and what counts as Upper Haight.
>> I guess you haven't really used padmapper if you don't understand how anyone could improve craigslist for you.
I used Padmapper as a newbie to the city but quickly found that the latency between postings on CL and the corresponding crawled updates on Padmapper were so high that the postings would have already been hit by a few dozen responses by the time I got it and in a hyper-competitive housing market like SF, this made all the difference.
I mean, look at all the misleading fucking tools who post "Palo Alto apartment for $1k/mo" which is actually in EAST PALO ALTO. With padmapper, it is clear. (In Menlo Park, where some areas are unincorporated, some are Menlo Park, some are Menlo Park but a warzone (Belle Haven, aka EPA North), etc., it's even more essential).
Apartment hunting on Craigslist is a total nightmare without Padmapper, and I'm resenting Craigslist more and more for relegating us all to using their horrible UI.
This is about the 3000th time I've read that phrase, or some variation of it, in the past ten years. If that were true then it would have happened already, no? Markets can fail in the short term, but in space as crowded with upstarts as the web, I just don't buy it over such a long period of time.
The thing I like most about Craigslist is that some guy made it just to help other people out. The thing I dislike most about all the people trying to "disrupt" Craigslist is that they're clearly in it for the money. I feel like this non-trivial selling point is lost on those who swear that CL is broken and needs replacing.
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
Padmapper's helped me and a few friends find our apartments in SF.
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.
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.
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.
One might think that Craigslist, of all companies, would understand that.
Innovation beats litigation in most long-run scenarios, IMHO.
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.
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.
I'm basically a Luddite and yours is the one service I always recommend.
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.
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.
- 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
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.
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.
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.
Each individual search has a low probability of success, but occasionally you'll succeed.
The Dutch version of Craigslist (Marktplaats, owned by eBay) is in a similar predicament.
They have a very sucky UI and have experimented with new and improved versions, but every improvement was quickly reverted after large drops in engagement.
It's almost surreal to look at their site (http://marktplaats.nl) and realize that there's tons of highly talented people behind it.
http://amsterdam.craigslist.org/apa/
But if I might inject an opposing data point, nobody seems to use the Brazilian version of Craigslist. Check out Sao Paulo:
http://saopaulo.craigslist.org/apa/
Can you believe that there are just 5 apartment listings for a metropolitan area of 19.9 million!
It's incomprehensible to me why Craigslist doesn't work there, especially since all the alternatives involve paying some middleman for listing. The same goes for job sites and "things for sale" sites as well. Brazilians prefer to use some scammy-looking sites loaded with graphics and eye candy and often charging a fee, rather than the vanilla Craigslist.
I'm going to venture a guess that this has much more to do with trust (Brazilians want to feel that someone has vetted the data) than with good/bad UI or web design.
As someone who, on many occasions, has rented in Brazil using classifieds sites, it's a mess. 'We' really, really need a CL-type site that everyone knows and uses. As a Californian, and former user of CL, it boggles my mind why CL-Brazil isn't used. It's there (here), it's usable, simple, and in Portuguese.
Instead, people use OLX (free) a little, Vivastreet (free) a little, EasyQuarto (paid) a little, and a few other sites that are either less popular or only work sometimes. Couchsurfing city-specific groups usually each have a sub-group for renting but a strange occurrence takes place there, almost no one puts the price-point. It's called doing business, paying money for a product or service, yet there's a real aversion to giving up the rental price in one's ad. Luckily, the more popular sites I mentioned make it so one has to list their rental price.
And my final two gripes are that very few people respond to inquiries into any particular ad (I think this is universal though) and a good 60% of ads here in Brazil only want women renters.
It's tough, I tell you...
The (pretty recent) equivalent would be http://leboncoin.fr, I guess.
This is not a recipe for success. It's a symptom of measuring the wrong metric, especially when you have a near monopoly on a market due to network effects. If this is really why Craigslist is not improving their UI, they need to hire some analysts that actually know WTF they're doing.
Oh good, nobody actually told you how they measured but you already know! Bravo.
I think it's unlikely they used a suboptimal performance indicator to judge the site's new design, and would say the same thing about craigslist.
Craigslist is a utility, not a website. They care about keeping it useful not only for users today, but for users in 10 years. That's not something startups care about at all. Startups are looking to amass users and then sell. Craigslist cares not about such goals.
Go ahead, get mad at their inflexibility. But then take a step back and think about what craigslist represents. And then wonder if you yourself would have the cajones to stick to your guns in todays startup market. I for one commend their ability to keep their product strong in the face of all the bells and whistles of web 2.0 or whatever it's called these days.
The only reason they don't have many competitors is because they have an information/platform monopoly. Just like many other tech companies, ebay and facebook come to mind as obvious examples.
I certainly don't confuse the two.
I couldn't care less what Craigslist LOOKS like, but its usability is profoundly broken in some areas (Denver Metro, for example).
The problem is that there's a Denver, Boulder, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins Craigslist. For those of you in the Bay Area, that would be roughly like having a distinct San Francisco, San Rafael, San Jose, and Santa Cruz Craigslist. If you're in between those places, which one do you look at? You have to look at more than one. Even if you're IN one of those places, which one do you look at? Sometimes three or four, if it's something you're willing to drive an hour to buy.
And if you're POSTING, where do you post? If you post a popular item to Boulder (because, say, you live in Boulder), then people in the next town over who only know about Denver won't see it, so you also have to post to Denver if you want everyone in a reasonable radius to see your item. Which means you have to violate Craigslist policies AND mess with your listing enough to get past its spam filter.
The sad thing is they've fixed it to the 80% level in the Bay Area, where the whole (extended!) Bay Area (even Santa Cruz, which isn't really Bay Area) is on a single Craigslist site with sub-area filters, but they just leave it broken here.
THIS is a usability problem.
And honestly so is the lack of "map these results," for times when you want to see which ones are closest, or which ones you could stop by on your way to work, or whatever.
It's not because it's not shiny or doesn't have gradients or drop shadows. It's because key features that I want from a classified site are sorely lacking.
Are you really going to argue that the site is more usable without that very basic feature?
If I am searching for a bike, a simple script to show image thumbnails by every listing will let me see which listings interest me. This saves me time, because now I only have to open a few interesting links. I don't have to scour through many of text links, just to see if they interest me.
The rentals section is constantly bombarded by spam and has very few filtering options. There is no way to exclude keywords. Boolean operators would greatly improve the usability of the site.
The problem is that you have to enter some search query before you can use the negation operator.
Also, protip to get past the spam in rentals section (Austin is holy crap bad about this): enter 'google' as your search term. This will only return ads that have an address specified and hence have the 'google maps' links. Plus, since you've entered a search term, you can filter out the locator who keeps spamming and screwing up your search by putting his phone number in the address section.
Here's a query I might have used during my last apartment search.
etc.So when can we expect to see your show HN: Craiglist done right?
Craigslist does not avoid disruption because it has the best product, it avoids disruption because it has a huge marketplace with a lot of buyers and sellers.
I suppose network effects (and the posting model) make up a large part of their popularity, but there's something to be said for a reliable and functional interface that works well and doesn't change on a whim.
It's constant in hn discourse to put great UI up there and to give advice on it.
Yet if anyone here has sat on a Bloomberg terminal, used Craigslist, or even games like net hack or dwarf fort, it's pretty clear that interface can be damned.
Not in all cases perhaps, agreed. But in these cases, after a while of using it people get faster and develop the muscle memory to become efficient on the site, so the UI fades into the background anyway.
Jared Spool has said that when you change the user interface - fairly dramatically - you frustrate your regular users because they are now unfamiliar with it and have to restart their learning/experience curve.
"At eBay, they learned the hard way that their users don't like dramatic change. One day, the folks at eBay decided they no longer liked the bright yellow background on many of their pages, so they just changed it to a white background.
Instantly, they started receiving emails from customers, bemoaning the change. So many people complained, that they felt forced to change it back."
http://www.uie.com/articles/death_of_relaunch/
Honestly thinking about other sites, digg died because of content, reddit survives because of content; even if someone could improve the interface, its not really going to matter.
Google is definitely content over interface (most of the time). Facebook... not so much - millions of people join protest petitions against every minor interface change - but the value of having all your friends together is still so much greater than the alternative of changing service, whereas reddit was a short step away for digg users.
4chan definitely remains popular because of content - canv.as, a similar project by the same owner, has nowhere near the traction despite being more demographically targeted for mass-market appeal.
I think the lesson is, if you have a close-enough competitor and a fickle userbase, one screwup is all it takes to push critical mass over the edge. If i ran a large website i would study the Digg-v4 case very carefully. Going back to Craigslist, i don't think they have to worry too much about losing their top spot just yet.
Craigslist is unwilling to let Padmapper buy a license to use their content. This isn't as black and white as "stealing content".
Seriously, I think I am the only person who doesn't think it is OK to torrent Game of Thrones. :)
Am I still stealing it?
I also don't understand why classifieds content is proprietary? Aren't they just facts? Please can someone explain?
I berated Craig over on Quora about this a while back - to say that he doesn't want to break it is bullshit - he is scared and lazy to better the site through even the smallest of updates.
The fact that "this posting has been deleted by its author" and "this post has been flagged for removal" still show up in results is down right infuriating.
Providing simply no way to browse items by picture is also laughable.
The content on CL is what is valuable, and Craig has been rumored to make 25 million per year off the site, and he doesn't want to muck with it because he doesn't want to hurt that income - but while doing so, he is keeping the content locked up in an abhorrent UX.
I'd be the same. Why mess with a goose that's already laying more gold eggs than you can use? For public service reasons maybe, but I'm confident CL is a (highly profitable) business foremost.
In craigslist's case, he could include a link on the old site that allows users to upgrade to a more modern version, and have the modern site basically consume an api/scrape the old CL till it gained momentum.
It also sends traffic back to CL. It shows the summary of the listing, and then when the user is interested, they can click through the pin to the actual Craigslist listing.
CL is deliberately making its service less useful both to its paying customers and the public at large. And the sole justification for this is fear that Padmapper could grow to be a bigger, better competitor someday in the distant future.
Leveraging a monopoly to destroy technological progress for fear of future competition is irksome.
It's almost certainly not illegal, and maybe not even morally wrong. But it still sucks.
Yet for all that, I'm moving on July 15th, and I think there's about a 95% chance I'll find the place through CL. That's where the market is.
This is all theorycraft though. If anyone had hard numbers on CL's market share for rentals I'd love to see them!
People keep building things using Craigslist data that users LOVE and Craigslist keeps shutting them down.
Craigslist is one of the great squandered opportunities for awesomeness on the internet.
It's just pure laziness and I'm sure the right talented team could make a product that beats Craig's list
a/b test
1) Padmapper shows the original craigslist page when you click through to the details page. 2) Padmapper doesn't seem to be monetizing itself in any obvious way, at least not directly through ads on content. 3) Craigslist doesn't monetize its content through ads, anyway.
Essentially all it offers is a wrapper that lowers the friction to discovery. You know, like those kids over at Google. Or Bing. Or DuckDuckGo. Are they stealing content?
All the other companies that have tried have also been told to C&D. If you don't like it, start your own network...
From http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use
"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."
Several innovative solutions have been invented over the years, the most obvious one is to do the CL scraping on the client, this way there is no indexing server to block, it's just the client reading all the search listings, parsing them and offering faceted filters. It breaks the spirit of the TOS but it would be impossible for CL to block. I am not advocating this, just pointing out one of the many approaches that have been attempted over the years.
Google can scan apartment listings and show them as results in their format. PadMapper cant. What's the difference?
See http://www.craigslist.org/robots.txt .
As a limited exception, general purpose Internet search engines and noncommercial public archives will be entitled to access craigslist without individual written agreements executed with CL that specifically authorize an exception to this prohibition if, in all cases and individual instances: (a) they provide a direct hyperlink to the relevant craigslist website, service, forum or content; (b) they access craigslist from a stable IP address using an easily identifiable agent; and (c) they comply with CL's robots.txt file ...
And what Craigslist does or doesn't do to make money shouldn't change what you're allowed to do with their content.
They've had an informal amnesty for services using their stuff for a long time, Craig has stated that they're OK with services that interface with them as long as they don't use many server resources, but they recently updated their TOU and started sending out huge waves of C&D's a few weeks ago, based on my talking with people.
This is without the permission of Craigslist or of the original submitter or the content.
What's more is that you are arguing against the notion that whoever creates the content (or own's the content) has the right to decide what gets done with that content. And no matter how much you dislike what they are doing with their content (ie. not creating a shiny interface to access said content), that does NOT give you the right to use that content without permission. It is my understanding that craigslist often gives out permissions to use it's content, and it would appear as though this company didn't bother to secure that permission.
eBay, for example, hasn't changed its (rather mediocre) interface in years, and managed to alienate at least some sellers with their policies. And yet, no one managed to make a dent in eBay's position.
Network effect is the reason there is funding for a million social network start-ups. Everyone wants to capture it. But the odds of success, on the other hand, are also one in a million.
I believe there was a post recently on HN where someone pointed out how these things work - one day it just takes off. Some combination of factors (three out of 100, perhaps) gets right and people flock to the site. And then the fate is sealed. Even in retrospect it's often impossible to say what factors were the key. So, I wouldn't be surprised if founders of Craigslist have little clue as to why it worked.
I'd be really really interested to see what it takes for someone to unseat Craigslist (or eBay, or any other major network).
I also think the network effect is being overstated in this instance. eBay has much stronger lock-in because I can't list my item in more than one auction at a time. But I can certainly list my apartment in more than one service.
I already check the local paper in addition to CL when looking for an apartment. If I'm looking for a bargain, I'm fine with shopping around.
I may be in the minority in Silicon Valley, but I'm honestly a really big fan of Craigslist, even despite their C&D'ing me, and I don't think it could or should be "disrupted". I think it's perfect for most of the things on there: lightning fast, few restrictions, community driven. I think it's massively better than that other alternative of having a ton of small websites that each do one thing well, but differently. I shop for new stuff almost exclusively via Amazon for the same reason that I shop exclusively on CL for used stuff.
We wrote about ugly design before, how in some cases it actually increases conversion rates. It's odd but sometimes ugly is beautiful...
http://sparknlaunch.wordpress.com/2012/02/02/keep-it-simple-...
If they are doing a great job and are so much better than CL then no doubt everyone will come back and use their site now they have the realtors on board.
I dislike people hating on another company for having a crappy product, just make a better one and compete against them, if they really are that bad then whatever network lock-in they have wont last. You can't argue they are crap, then try and use them to monetise your own product.
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.
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.
It's putting apartment listings on a map. People listing apartments tend to want it to be widely known.
those same people are already getting their listing widely known, by posting it on CL.
wat??
While I appreciate the sentiment, it is very unlikely that a landlord would object to an apartment listing being aggregated so as to expose it to more users.
If padmapper wants the data why don't they just obtain consent from the CL posters, instead of copying it without consent.
How do you propose padmapper do that without violating the Craigslist TOS in some other way like bulk-emailing everyone who lists an apartment?
I'm not saying their conduct wasn't a bit of a grey area, against the TOS and maybe a copyright violation, but I don't think many Craigslist users would object personally to their posts being reposted in this manner.