Denver, Colorado based Superhero.es has built crgslst, a very slick multi-city search tool for Craigslist. Craigslist itself doesn't offer a multi-search service. By combining the publicly available RSS feeds from Craigslist with AJAX, crgslst fills this need "so fast, we left the vowels behind."
Unfortunately, crgslst may be in violation of the Craigslist terms of use and could face the same shutdown that other similar projects have in the past. This situation brings up a number of questions about intellectual property, RSS and mashups.
Three years ago developer Jeff Attwood built a service at his site Coding Horror that performed a multi-city search of Craigslist, only to receive a shutdown order from Craigslist by email. That email included lines from the Terms of Use that are still present today.
Additionally, you agree not to:... use automated means, including spiders, robots, crawlers, data mining tools, or the like to download data from the Service - unless expressly permitted by craigslist;
What's an RSS feed though, but an API that lets 3rd parties download data from a site by automated means? Isn't Craigslist, or at least Housing Maps, the long-time darling of the mashup world? Some folks at least contend that an API is a way for noncommercial mashups to be developed without a lengthy, formal business development process.
There's no indication that crgslst has received any contact from Craigslist, but the history of similar services and the continued presence of the language above in the Terms of Use don't bode well.
Just the thought of a service like this getting shut down is sad. It's a great little site, offering a user experience that Craigslist itself would do well to offer. Who's IP is at work at crgslst, though?
For now, you can check out crgslst and see just one more example of the kinds of magic that becomes possible when a website offers its data in a standards-based format like RSS.
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Can data be copyrighted?
Apparently, prices can be copyrighted:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=519564
Is this analagous?
Does Craiglist really have a right to dicate how other people use information that Craiglist makes publicly available -- as long as a copyright is not infringed? (That's why I brought up the copyrighting information question).
It's an interesting question.
From an ethical point of view, I think we should respect their TOS. The fact is, Craiglist's is a listing service. Listing services generally don't syndicate their content en masse because the value they provide is the searchable listings.
Their RSS feeds seem to be intended for individuals, not other companies and I think Craiglist has a right to make that distinction.
Granted, I see your point that Craiglist is not offering the service that crgslst is offering currently. So what happens if Craiglist does want to offer that service?
(And BTW - I don't think this is analagous to the Harvard story I link to above. In that case, the Harvard COOP's main business model is NOT providing information. They retail books. If their main business was providing pricing information and they had clear policies about how that info would be used, then I'd think differently.)
Posted by: kayvaan | March 12, 2008 2:41 PMwhy would Craigslist shut them down? I don't see how something like this would interfere with their business or hurt them in any way.
Posted by: Open English | March 12, 2008 2:51 PM@Open:
The problem, I would guess, is the business model.
Once you become the destination URL for searching somebody else's listings, it's a very short hop to accepting your own ads. The moment you do that, you're disrupting CL's business model and cutting into their revenue stream.
Realistically, a service with a name like "crgslst" seems to be pure value add with no intention of attacking the mother ship in that manner.
However I also know that IP enforcement is a strange business, where in some cases companies have to defend it uniformly in order to protect their right to defend it in the future. IANAL, and have no idea whether that applies in this case or not. Hopefully not. Looks like a nice little utility.
===
Totally OT: Marshall, are you going to Startupalooza @ cubespace?
Posted by: Paul | March 12, 2008 3:38 PMThere's another issue: tools like this let people use Craigslist in ways that, quite frankly, degrade the quality of it.
I have posted "gigs" ads on Craigslist several times looking for people with specific skill sets to help out on client projects. In each case, I've specified that I want someone in a specific geographic location.
The power of Craigslist is, of course, that it's a local market. So when I post something on the Houston Craigslist page, explain in some detail what skills I need, and say, "Houston metro area only, please," I'd like to think that for my time I'll get real responses.
Whenever I do this, the responses are at most 5-10% people in Houston, because people are using tools like this to do multi-city searches and send out spam responses.
Craigslist doesn't allow multi-city search specifically to avoid this sort of thing (same reason you can't do multi-city posts). The result of people getting around it is that Craigslist is a whole lot less useful to people like me - using it for what it's designed for - than it should be. (If I didn't care about location, I'd put my query somewhere not location specific.)
So I think that is one reason that Craigslist might object to this. You can question whether Craigslist strictly-local approach is the right one, but it is what they've decided to do (and it's worked pretty well for them). So, by their idea of what the site is for, there's no legitimate reason to perform multi-site searches - unless you're planning to spam people who are making local queries and thus degrade the value of the site for everyone.
Posted by: John Whiteside | March 12, 2008 4:02 PMJohn, thanks for telling that story - I think you've hit the nail on the head. I bet that's exactly why CL doesn't want tools like this out there.
Posted by: Marshall KirkpatrickHmm - I notice now that they don't allow aggregated multi city searches. Which makes a big difference - and so now I'm really curious how Craigslist will react to this.
Posted by: John Whiteside | March 12, 2008 4:09 PMJohn, as you noted, crgslst doesn't allow you to search across multiple regions (which makes it much less useful for me). It also keeps it different from sites like http://crazedlist.org/ which does.
I'm sure Craig will come up with some reason to stop crgslst, but I wouldn't bet that the reason will be a good one.
Posted by: Danni Poehler | March 12, 2008 6:41 PMYour last link on there is missing one of the letters, goes to crgslt.com instead of crgslst.com.
Posted by: Michael Jensen | March 12, 2008 7:48 PMI don't know why craigslist is so private with data that is publicly. Flugpo: A Social Classified Network would not try so hard to keep their data private.
Posted by: Flugpo Staff | March 12, 2008 7:52 PMI love the idea - too bad it doesn't work in Canada. Then again, we've yet to get the iPhone yet so having another cool service unavailable is just the way it is.
Posted by: Mark Evans | March 13, 2008 6:21 AMI love this site and have managed to use it quite a lot lately since it surfaced on the blogs. I also used piclist when it was around but unfortunately it got killed. I really hope Craigslist doesn't pull a bitch move and kill it.
Posted by: Brad | March 13, 2008 7:47 AMcraig speaks on overall site:
http://www.intothebox.tv/archive/160_Words_of_Wisdom__From_A_Man_With_An_Apt._Plan
Posted by: Lang | March 13, 2008 8:21 AMAn alternative to crgslst is clcompanion.
http://www.craigslistcompanion.com
Give it a try, it is also free.
Posted by: Hanso | March 19, 2008 3:25 PMthis is another great tool:
natoinwide search & ads watcher (notifer)
oh ya, it's free..
www.craiglisttoolbar.com
Posted by: doctorgiga | March 25, 2008 9:46 PM