Craigslist, that quaint digital home to unwanted couches and vacant two-bedroom bungalows, has begun attaching maps to some of its listings. That would be humdrum news if it were about any other website, but Craigslist is so famously hidebound, so trapped in the Netscape era, that even legal foes are cheering its maps as a sign of innovation.
The maps appear on housing listings in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon, and pull data from OpenStreet Map, a collaborative, freely licensed collection of directions and images. Craigslist joins Apple, Foursquare, and Wikipedia in preferring the open maps over embeddable maps from Google, as the Talking Points Memo reported.
But the bigger deal here is that 17-year-old Craigslist is experimenting with the sort of innovation it has long resisted. After moving from e-mail to the web in 1996, the site added search, self-posting, and a flagging system several years later. In the years since, it has stubbornly resisted enhancements like images on the index pages, multi-city search, and maps.
“I hear this all the time -- you guys are so primitive, you are like cavemen,” CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wired in 2009. “But the people I hear it from are invariably working for firms that want the job of redoing the site. In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them.”
Craigslist regularly blocks sites that try to enhance its listings from the outside. It even filed suit against one, Padmapper, just last month. PadMapper takes Craigslist listings and places them on an easily searched map. Craigslist alleges the company is violating copyright law and breaching a contract with Craigslist, among other things.
“I'm glad something good came out of all this,” says PadMapper creator Eric DeMenthon. “Lots of people wrote to them about the PadMapper cease and desist [letter], so maybe that convinced them that it was worthwhile to do some mapping themselves.
“In any case, I'm happy that they're working to make things better.”
Cragislist doesn’t yet aggregate multiple listings onto a single map the way PadMapper does, and we couldn’t reach the company to find out if it has plans to do so. But given that it’s begun baby-stepping into the world of modern data interfaces, maybe some more upgrades are in the cards. But don't hold your breath. Considering how long it has taken Craigslist to get this far, you're likely to find a reasonably priced, light-filled Victorian flat in San Francisco in far less time.
