For some strange and terrible reason my wife Erica and I have moved almost every year for the last six years. I promise we've never been evicted, just never quite satisfied with the dungeon like apartments Palo Alto had to offer at the time our leases usually ends.
PadMapper has been a small ray of sunshine in a dark sea of Bay Area apartment listings. If you know exactly where you want to live (location wise) there is no better site than PadMapper to help you find a place. It's also great at showing you what listings you've already looked at and makes it easier to identify the fake listings. A few weeks ago this all came to a screeching halt when Craigslist sent Padmapper a cease-and-desist for breaking their terms and conditions by scraping data off their website and populating it onto the PadMapper site.
There is been a lot of coverage on the subject and most have run to PadMapper's corner to vilify the over the hill local listing site Craigslist. From the outside, Craigslist appears to be run by a few dozen hippies in a cramped basement somewhere inside San Francisco. Certainly no one but a hippie could stand to look at that site all day every single day and not be compelled to make some changes.
But in actuality Craigslist is a well run organization that aggressively defends the incredible position it has built over the last 17 years. Not only do they have more than 40 employees, but they have a legal team that aggressively goes after any site that attempts to leverage their network to build a new one. Craigslist has no API, and as Kenneth Walton the founder of KlickNation put it, "Seemingly (has) no interest in building one, so anyone who builds something on top of Craigslist data is taking his chances." Craigslist founder Craig Newmark has publicly added, "Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple."
So from the outside PadMapper appears to fit all the criteria of a product that Craigslist would allow to live on top of the platform. But what pundits have failed to identify is that PatMapper has been selling and building their own listings essentially building a Craigslist competitor. Put yourself in Craigslist shoes. You build a massive platform and distribution network that someone then, without your consent, comes in and leverages (scraping your data), then starts building their own platform on top of that.
There's nothing new about this, Craigslist has seen this movie before. AirB&B is notorious for doing this to get to scale, Zaarly has as well. There are a dozen other sites that use Craigslist to drive traffic to their create their own communities.
Prior to the cease-and-desist, PadMapper had never had any conversations with anyone at Craigslist. As the founder explained it to me, Craigslist is known for letting some sites go under the radar and he hope they would be one. Fortunately or unfortunately Craigslist took no action for many years which allowed PadMapper to gain a massive following and create a very compelling product.
To PadMapper founder Eric DeMenthon's credit, when I mentioned that PadMapper now competes with Craigslist, he said that it was never his intention to do so and he would gladly remove the ability to post his own listings if Craigslist would grant access. "I have no desire to compete with Craigslist," Eric says.
But in the age-old decision to ask for permission or ask for forgiveness, this was the wrong call. And with all of media shrapnel that this has created, it seems like a stretch that Craigslist will forgive and forget.
But from my personal experience, if there were a website that deserved a second chance there's no doubt it is PadMapper and the team that have taken Craigslist's massive dataset and turned it into something truly useful.