Apartment Search Engine PadMapper Gets A Cease-And-Desist From Craigslist, Removes Listings. Update: PadMapper found a workaround to include Craigslist postings again. It’s been years since I’ve had to look for an apartment, but in that time multiple friends have sung the praises of PadMapper (TechCrunch alumnus Greg Kumparak is a fan too). Usually, they describe it as a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist. Starting today, unfortunately, they’ll have to scratch “Craigslist” from the equation. According to an account that creator Eric DeMenthon published on the PadMapper blog, and that he elaborated on over email, Craigslist’s lawyer sent him a cease-and-desist letter earlier this week, demanding that PadMapper take down any postings from Craigslist. The lawyer also sent DeMenthon a mobile license, so he could pay to use the postings in a mobile app.
“When I told him that the website was the most important part of PadMapper, and that many millions of people depend on PadMapper to find places, the lawyer said flatly that they don’t license to websites,” DeMenthon says. Save Padmapper! Craigslist is wrong to shut them down. An open letter to Craig - garry's posterous. Bye Bye Craigslist :-( It’s with a heavy heart that I must announce that PadMapper is no longer including Craigslist rental listings – they’re currently being wiped from the search index. I recently received a Cease and Desist letter from Craigslist, and wasn’t able to get a meeting or convince Craigslist’s lawyer that PadMapper was beneficial to Craigslist and apartment hunters in general.
They allow mobile apps to display their listings if you buy a license from them, but not websites. If you or any of your friends that PadMapper has helped would like to weigh in and tell them how PadMapper has helped you search through Craigslist, you can contact them at: jim@craigslist.org – Jim Buckmaster, CEOcraig@craigslist.org – Craig Newmark, Founder If you do contact them, please, please keep it civil. PadMapper still has a lot of other sources, I’ll be adding more, and I’ll keep mapping pads, but it’s a sad day for pad mapping and apartment hunting. Thanks everyone, Eric ☮ Help Replenish Landlord Listings on PadMapper using PadLister. A couple years ago, when I thought seriously that Craigslist might ask me to remove their listings and that I should have a backup plan, I created PadLister for listing directly on PadMapper.
Over time it started to seem like CL was probably OK with PadMapper, so I haven’t pushed PadLister at all except for a little link on PadMapper. Many of you are now asking me about direct listing options, so it seems like I should let everyone know about it now. With Craigslist gone, PadMapper is likely missing a lot of the best sublet/small landlord options, so I’d really like to get small landlords to list directly. So, if you or anyone you know wants to find a tenant, let them know that they should post on PadLister (they should also post on Craigslist – PadLister helps with that, actually)
. , or go to PadMapper and hit the “Post a Pad” link. Thanks everyone for your overwhelming support in this, I’ve gotten hundreds of emails about this, most of them extremely nice. Bringing Craigslist Back. I’ve been wrestling with whether to bring back Craigslist listings in the search results. I’ve found a way to include them that I’m told is legally kosher since it doesn’t touch their servers at all, but it still seems somewhat dickish to go against their wishes in this, and I’ve always had a lot of respect for what they’ve done for the world. Also, court seems like it’d be no fun.
But then I did some back of the envelope estimates of how much of people’s time and effort it would waste if I didn’t, and it became clear how much less nice it is to waste the time of millions of apartment hunters out of stubbornness or some clearly inaccurate assumption about the will of the community. If it takes half of PadMapper’s millions of monthly users 3 hours longer now to find an apartment, that’s over 350 man-years wasted per month, or 5 lifetimes. So, effective as soon as I can bring the new code up (almost certainly by the time you read this), I’m bringing the Craigslist search results back.
Craigslist sues apartment search site PadMapper over listings. (Updated 6:00pm with 3Taps response) Craigslist has followed up on earlier threats and filed a lawsuit against popular apartment listing site PadMapper. The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data. In a complaint filed in San Francisco, Craigslist is accusing PadMapper and “one stop data shop” 3taps of a slew of infractions, including copyright and trademark violations, and is demanding the court issue a preliminary injunction to stop them from using its listings. PadMapper, the site at the center of the dispute, is popular because of a modern interface that lets apartment hunters see a variety of potential places on a single map (see screenshot at right for an example).
Much of its data, however, is drawn from Craigslist listings. After receiving a cease and desist letter from Craigslist in June, PadMapper agreed to take the listings down. Legal Toss-ups McHugh makes a fair case that Craigslist is shortchanging consumers. When Craigslist Blocks Innovations - Disruptions. Thor Swift for The New York TimesCraig Newmark, founder and chairman of Craigslist, shown in 2004 at his company’s office in San Francisco. In 1995, a good-hearted programmer named Craig Newmark thought of a way to make newspaper classified ad listings simple, and in turn, people’s lives easier. His free Web site, called Craigslist, quickly gained millions of users. Eye-popping offers to buy the company outright came in, all of which Mr. Newmark turned down, saying Craigslist was a “public good.” Despite its success, Craigslist has become stagnant.
Today, it feels stuck in the 1990s, where links are electric blue and everything is underlined. One might think Craigslist is as ready for disruption as sleepy newspaper classified ad sections once were. There may be part of the answer in this tale. Last week, Craigslist served Mr. But, according to Mr. “I was kind of disappointed. This isn’t the first time Craigslist has claimed such violations. Yet something doesn’t add up in all this. Mr. Craigslist Rolls Out New Map View Feature for Apartment Searches. Even as it’s locked in a legal dispute with apartment hunting sites over use of its data, Craiglist has released its own mapping feature for the apartment listings on its website.
The service appears to be rolling out gradually, as it showed up in several cities, including the Bay Area, Los Angeles and Ann Arbor, but it wasn’t available on the New York and London sites. Craigslist’s plans weren’t exactly a secret, given that it had filed multiple cease & desist actions and lawsuits against PadMapper and other sites in an effort to block them from scraping its data. It has been on the receiving end as well, as data supplier 3taps has filed a countersuit against Craigslist alleging antitrust violations and unfair competition. The new functionality allows users to toggle between the traditional list view and a map view. The maps are powered by the Leaflet javascript tool and make use of data from OpenStreetMap.
(hat tip @Colleran) Image credit: stock.xchng.