Meet Craiggers: It Blows Craigslist Out of The Water | Hacker News Reader

Meet Craiggers: It Blows Craigslist Out of The Water

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13 pointsdevinfoley17 comments

Legal dispute in 3... 2... 1...

Haven't other's tried implementing new UIs for craigslist, only to be "shot down" by craigslist? [things like this were mentioned in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963561 ]

In other news: it looks like flippity.com changed to working as an eBay search engine (found after following link in what I referenced above), interesting.

So what's your point? Imagine if facebook or google had let the fear of a potential legal dispute stop them.

Craig Newmark himself laid out what concerns he might (or might not) have. Craiggers architecture meets Craigs standard of not putting a load on CL to host the data. Here's Craig's own quote on Quora:

http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-...

Craig Newmark, customer service rep & founder 33 votes by Rodney Pearce, June Lin, Ludi Rehak, (more) "Actually, we take issue with only services which consume a lot of bandwidth, it's that simple."

I'm having a hard time seeing how this is better than Craigslist itself. Also, need to lose the animations - they're useless eye candy and it just slows down the UI.

Perhaps you could elaborate a bit on how it's not better than craigslist.

Also, twitter, kayak, hipmunk etc. all take advantage of UI animations quite similar to the ones used here. A bit more complex than simply changing the color of a car ;)

How does this blow Craigslist out of the water? As far as I can tell, it's the same old craigslist, questionably skinned, and with less options.

Well, you can search across multiple locations/categories and there's saved searches and favorites.

It certainly is an impressive UI, but the search function doesn't seem to be as effective as the one on Craigslist itself. For example, when I searched for 1 bedroom apartments on Craigslist in my area, I got 18 results, all of them for 1 bedroom apartments. When I used Craiggers, I got 9 results, half of them for 2 bedroom apartments.

I don't know if this is a limitation of the API or of Craiggers' search, but either way, a good UI is useless without good data to back it up.

Finally, I don't think Craigslist's UI is actually that terrible. I think its rather refreshing to have a site that simply displays information as a set of HTML links, rather than trying to stuff an entire application into the browser. It doesn't seem to be a popular way of making things these days, but I wish more web sites would try it.

I think the headline is about four words too long.

Five words. ;)

Wait, which for words? Does craiggers just blow craigslist? Is it a vile headline when you remove the 4 words? Just curious. ;)

UI fail - slow.

Which part specifically? I work on the project so any feedback I get is very valuable!

The part where you enter something to search for and it takes over 10 seconds for a result.

Thanks. That's not normal. We're definitely experiencing some slowdown from the traffic spike.

Vile

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