Caleb Elston

I've wanted this same service to exist as well! I would show a map of the city, I.e. San Francisco, and have it divided into the different areas or districts. The areas would have the major landmarks or popular destinations show up on the map. You could then click on the area you want and bring up almost a mini website for the area and it could have the official city explanation of the area coupled with comments or reviews from residents that live there. Also, a list of shops and restaurants could be found in the section. Property owners could then use the section to list their properties for rent and the person looking would have some idea of what the area is like. It would take awhile and a lot of legwork to gather all that data but if it's accessible for the businesses and residents to upload their own info it could be done. The information would be moderated of course but it could provide a sense of community for the neighborhoods to show what they got. It might even help keep informed the residents already there about new restaurants or retail stores in their area. Endless possibilities, really. That's how I see it working.

Cathy: That sounds great, so cool to know others have felt the same pain. It is crazy something like this doesn't exist yet. I really want to be able to type in what is important to me and then have it show "hot areas" that have apartments that match my criteria and are in areas that meet my other desires in terms of closeness to certain shops and such.

I had ranted about the same type of thing when Allen Stern (centernetworks.com) first asked about moving to a new city. There are no tools to help for this kind of thing. I was even looking for something that would be purely tech related, like what startups were in the area, what the tech community had for events, etc. Good luck in the apartment search, but I can't refer you to anything good either.

i could talk about this for days - im working on a long post about how horrible craigslist is. as you say, dupe listings, fake photos, fake listings, caps, no caps, keyword spoofing, locations that are fake, etc. - yesterday i replied to a listing and got a reply later in the day telling me to send them my credit report first before viewing the apt - ha. it's miserable - i have 10 days to decide if im staying in nyc or leaving.

Rob: I thought I was crazy when I couldn't find a tool that met my needs, "Surely there must be a service that helps people find a place" but low and behold there isn't. We really need to get on this :)

Allen: I have been following your series about different places to live, so I can only imagine how hellish it must be to dive into different Craigslist cities each and every day, and being bombarded with scam after scam. My buddy just got one of the "Credit Report" scam ones too. I thought dupes were against the TOS. Instead of policing the Cat vs. Dog discussion forum, they should focus on the apt listings for a while.

Hi there, PadMapper dev here. Thanks for the mention! I agree with most of what you said - there's nothing out there that's really there yet. PadMapper is a work in progress, and I'd love to hear what you imagine could get it to where it could be.

Area research tools are something I'd definitely like to add, once I figure out how to do it right. Suggestions welcome...

Hey Eric,

Thanks for taking the time to read and comment, that makes me like PadMapper even more :)

Seriously though, I didn't talk much about what you guys are doing, but it is the best Craigslist apartment mashup I have seen, so kudos.

A few things I would love to see:

1) Accounts so you can remember which listings I have clicked on, so when I return I am sure I am only seeing new items. Dupes are one of my biggest pet peeve for Craigslist and you guys can solve that, since you won't allow 2 pins at the same address.

2) A way to setup alerts for certain neighborhoods so you can alert me via email when new listings that meet my criteria are posted. This is tied back into 1, because the RSS feeds from Craigslist are so full of dupes it becomes spam.

Are you in San Francisco? Would love to connect sometime.

Hey Caleb,

Thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, I think trying to weed out all of the spam on Craigslist is probably the worst part about vanilla CList hunting. PadMapper takes the stance of "when in doubt, throw it out". This gets it flak from some as being incomplete (especially listers who want to be shown), but I think it's better to throw out some legit listings and show people listings that passed a screening than to show everything, spam included. Not to say that what's on PM is spam-free, though... I still need to work on this. It's especially going to be an issue for the email alerts.

1) I've been trying to avoid accounts for now by offering short-term persistence via cookie/session combined in some cases with long-term saving and sending of a link that can reconstitute the thing you're saving (this is how favorites lists work currently). I think #2 can be handled pretty well without needing to add accounts.

2) I've actually been thinking a lot about the problem of email alerts recently, and it's on the short list of things I want to implement soon. I think it could be managed by a simple "Subscribe to Updates" for the current filter settings/view, so you get updates on changes to the currently viewable set. I'm thinking you'd enter your email address, and you'd get an hourly email update until you clicked an unsubscribe link in one of the emails. I might include a management link in the emails to edit the updates, but I think that I'll make it a simpler "make a new one to replace the old" type of system.

PadMapper is based in Brooklyn, unfortunately. If you want to discuss more/offer a rebuttal to some of what I said, I'd be happy to continue the discussion via email - padmapper@gmail.com.

Best,
Eric

Just wanted to let you know, I just released an early version of email alerts last night. There's no de-duping of CList entries currently, but I wanted to get it out there for people to try. Still have to come up with a good way to do deduping.

Hi Eric,

That's awesome, gonna check it out right now :) Keep up the awesome work.

Hi Caleb,
Totally understand your pain. I was a grad student, and went through this pain every August. When we started Cazoodle, naturally, apartment search was our first application.

We aggregate listings from thousands of online web sources, and put them on map for easy navigation. Check it out. Would love to hear your comments.

Govind