Craigslist started off as a friendly alternative to the slow, limited world of printed classified ads, offering everything from used furniture to apartment sublets to "romance." While that much hasn't changed, the company is now taking action against third party developers and inhibiting its users. This doesn't sit well with me, and I don't think it should with you either.
What Did Craigslist Do?
Craigslist has found itself in the news lately thanks to two unpopular decisions: filing a lawsuit against Padmapper, a third-party webapp that makes finding apartments on Craigslist much easier, and changing its terms to prevent users from posting ads elsewhere. Let's talk about both, and why they're not only bad in and of themselves, but also how they affect the future.
Craigslist Sued Padmapper
Padmapper is a good site maintained by a good developer, Eric DeMenthon. He created the webapp to help make sense of Craigslist's apartment listings. If you search Craigslist for an apartment, it takes a lot of time to view them all and, more importantly, determine if that listing is in a desirable location. PadMapper solves both of these problems by placing a pin on a Google Map of any specified area so you can easily search Craigslist (and other sources) for apartments based on where you want to live. Clicking on any of the pins provides you with the posting title, thumbnails of the photos, and a few statistics about the apartment. If you want to view more, PadMapper sends you right over to Craigslist, much in the same way a search engine does. It doesn't repurpose Craigslist's content as its own, but rather directs you to it in order to be fair.
Although PadMapper operated in this fashion for years—and helped me find several excellent apartments in the process—Craigslist recently decided it didn't want PadMapper to continue using its data. As a result, PadMapper removed Craigslist from its data sources which severely limited the usefulness of the tool. About a week later, PadMapper found a third party service that was able to legally provide Craigslist data and used it to bring the listings back to PadMapper. It didn't take long before Craigslist filed a law suit against both PadMapper and the data provider.
PadMapper made Craigslist better. It did this while still directing users to Craigslist, rather than keeping all the data for itself. To me, this sounds like a win-win situation for both parties. Clearly Craigslist doesn't feel that way, and it has chosen a course of action that hurts third-party developers and us, its users.
Craigslist Decided to Own Your Posts
Until recently, anything you posted to Craigslist belonged to you because you created it. You, of course, were obligated to allow them to use your content because it was on their site. Still, you owned what you posted. That recently changed, as the following popped up in the latest version of Craigslist's user agreement:
Clicking ‘continue' confirms that Craigslist is the exclusive licensee of this content, with the exclusive right to enforce copyrights against anyone copying, republishing, distributing, or preparing derivative works without its consent.
Not only does this provide ammunition against third-party developers like PadMapper from republishing Craigslist content, but it prevents you from republishing your own content. If you want to post the same ad elsewhere, you can't. By posting on Craigslist you're providing them with an exclusive license for your content. This is bad for everyone except Craigslist.
UPDATE: On Friday, August 9th (2012), Craigslist backtracked and removed their claim to exclusive licensing. While this doesn't solve every problem discussed in this post, it's a start!
How Can We Improve the Situation?
Despite Craigslist's recent behavior, the company has done a lot of good and the fact of the matter is we're not going to agree with everything a business chooses to do. Apple's long been under scrutiny for the way Chinese workers are treated by its primary manufacturing partner, Foxconn. Chick-Fil-A recently came under fire for its CEO's publicly-stated opposition to gay marriage rights. Facebook is constantly criticized for making choices that large numbers of its users hate. These are just a few of the issues we're aware of, and they're much larger than the problem with Craigslist that we're discussing right now. For the most part, if you were to take any company and look at their behavior you're ultimately going to find some action you don't agree with. We can't simply boycott every company due to a difference of opinion, so what can we do?
Make our opinions heard - If you don't like the way Craigslist is acting, tell them. Use their official feedback form or email their founder. I also created a site to help people easily show your support on social media and a badge you can use to do the same elsewhere.
Become less reliant on products and services - We've become very reliant on products and services, and this has stopped us from doing many things ourselves. If you have enough money, you don't have to cook, clean, figure out how to stay healthy, sell your own stuff, leave your home to meet people, perform house repairs, and much more. You can also buy plenty of expensive products so that you have something fun to do without others. As more products and services become integrated into how we live our lives, we stop taking care of ourselves in many different ways. It makes boycotts unrealistic because we're too addicted. It hurts the possibility of competition because we'd rather just stick with the thing we know even when there's a better option. Complaining only goes so far. We need to start being less company-reliant and more self-reliant.
Do something better - Problems have one great silver lining: there's often a great way to solve them. If you don't like something, make something better. Create an alternative, or help someone who already is.
I love Craigslist, but they're heading down a restrictive road that isn't good for third-party developers or users. Hopefully we can all come to the table and figure out how Craigslist can operate in a way that works well for everyone involved.