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Comment by dredmorbius | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to see how CL views this in light of section 5 of their TOU:

    Any copying, aggregation, display, distribution, performance or 
    derivative use of craigslist or any content posted on craigslist
    whether done directly or through intermediaries (including but not
    limited to by means of spiders, robots, crawlers, scrapers, framing,
    iframes or RSS feeds) is prohibited.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/terms.of.use

Would CL really want to sue its users though?

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Isn't a user's browser technically an intermediary? The browser reads html from an initial request and makes automated additional requests for images, javascript and css files, etc and then renders the page using its own rendering engine. The only difference here is that the browser is making multiple requests and using a different rendering engine (the extension) to display it using a map.

There's an obvious market for people who want the amount of data that craigslist has, but wanted it displayed in a smarter way that allows better filtering and searching. They could make a killing licensing their data to 3rd party sites (or launching a new site with an improved interface). Instead they are giving users more and more reasons to switch to other services.

Plus he has open sourced it now https://github.com/alanhamlett/CLMapper

I don't think this is aimed at users at all but at what padmapper was doing - using an intermediary to copy CL data.

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