Craigslist is on board: OpenStreetMap soars to new heights | Hacker News Reader

Craigslist is on board: OpenStreetMap soars to new heights

arstechnica.com

68 pointsevo_938 comments

The good news: CL now show a map on the listing itself (previously you had a link to a Google Maps page), which makes it somewhat easier to tell where a listing is located.

What's still missing is the geographic overview that PadMapper offered. If you want that experience, and access to CL listings, your best bet appears to be the "CLMapper" Chrome extension, which pops up a two-panel brwoser window with listings on the left, map on the right, and coordination between the two (hovering over a listing URL highlights the map pin, hovering over a map pin scrolls to and highlights the listing entry).

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/omonmigaleaafgpkgo...

The observation that GoogleMaps commercial terms-of-use is increasingly driving third-party sites to free and open alternatives is noted. With irony.

And the best part of CLMapper is how Craigslist can't block it

Why would they, unlike PadMapper, it's not doing anything that's prohibited by CL's terms.

Because CL hates freedom, didn't you hear?

Even the map on the listing is only confined to certain cities, it seems. They're showing up on SF Bay and Portland listings, but not in Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC, Boston, Vancouver, Houston, Philadelphia or anywhere else I looked.

The really good news is that (somehow) PadMapper is still up and working.

Last weekend I was adding a map on the listing page for CLMapper and noticed Craigslist beat me to it! I spent that saved time making the star icons save favorites ;)

>"Google Maps offers bells and whistles that OpenStreetMap doesn't, such as street level data [and] more updates to imagery," wrote Caitlin Dempsey, the editor of GISLounge.com, in an e-mail sent to Ars.

This sounds like a serious underestimation of the value that street level data adds to relevant applications, especially for pedestrians, tourists and people looking to do a quick check of the scenery in the vicinity of the location.

Street level data is huge in terms of scoping out a neighborhood that you intend to live in

I have a really bad sense of direction, so if I'm going to be driving in an unfamiliar area, I'll always street view the highway to see what it actually looks like where I need to take an exit, etc. Couldn't switch from Google Maps without street view.

I also use Street View quite a lot (Australian here). However, I use OpenStreetMap for everything else.

I don't actually access it from OpenStreetMap though, rather, I use it through http://open.mapquest.com in my browser, or OsmAnd+ on my phone (with offline data). You'll find that for th ehalf of the time you don't need street view, it is really easy to switch of Google maps.

I use Street View probably about as much as I use the Maps themselves. Any time I'm going somewhere, I'll map it, then Street View it, so I know what I'm looking for.

Street View is one of my favourite things Google has done in years, and I couldn't imagine life without it these days.

Sucks to live in Germany sometimes :(

We tried using open street map at mozio for a by. For u our primary concern was public transit data. T was too much bother and too expensive to do transit data, and googles release of the transit API a couple months ago solidified or decision to go with google maps for the foreseeable future. Osm is fine for applications like Wikipedia and four square which don't require much on top of maps but for companies doing more advanced things google is still the best choice.

better than ESRI?

That doesn't bode well for Apple, then.

I didn't know Google finally released the transit API! http://googlegeodevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/06/public-trans...

If nothing else at least the PadMapper thing is forcing Craigslist to innovate. (It's a totally useless interface, though.)

I'm not keen on the look of OSM. I know you can create your own tiles, but I suspect many people wont.

For me, there's too much detail, making OSM difficult to look at and parse.

OSM has a long way to go design wise. I also think there's a lot of room to innovate with design in cartography (Apple have done well in this regard).

I general, design and open source haven't managed to find a rhythm. Probably because design by committee always fails, and open source design is always going to be design by committee. But that's a whole other conversation.

The OSM tiles are intended for mappers building the database and so err on the side of too much detail.

As you say, for display you can make your own tiles, but you can also get them (free for many uses) from a range of 3rd parties:

http://switch2osm.org/providers/

If you just want a drop in replacement for Google, rather than something unique then this is probably your best bet:

http://open.mapquest.com/

OSM is great, except they don't provide a https solution for their tiles, which is necessary if you run your site over https. It is easy enough to setup a free nginx proxy on heroku to workaround this issue (which then sits behind cloudflare for transparent caching), but it would be nice if OSM just provided https.

Here's a link to their donation page: http://donate.openstreetmap.org/

They appear to be running their own map servers that just use OSM data, so that doesn't apply here.

Nope. They are doing exactly what I'm talking about which is proxying the tiles through their own hostnames so that they can get https support.

map#.craigslist.org. The leafletjs api makes this easy to do.

Are you sure that OSM offer this service? Is it free? I can't find any details of it- it must be an utter bandwidth killer. Do you know where the details of the service are?

It seems as if it is free: http://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/3440/cost-of-commerc...

Though that answer is over a year and a half old.

That is talking about OSM data, which is quite different to OSM map tiles. The tiles are the result of the data, but the cost of providing data is miniscule compared to hosting tile servers.

OSM absolutely do not provide free high traffic tile serving! http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_usage_policy

Perhaps a commercial OSM partner like MapQuest, MapBox or Cloudmade are providing the tiles?

That's what I assumed. Any commercial provider would have made noise about providing maps, I would have thought- and been credited in the bottom right of the map. It's entirely possible to set up your own servers providing map tiles using Mapnik, I wonder if that is the route they took.

Craigslist is probably hosting their own tiles judging by the URL: http://map7.craigslist.org/t00/15/5242/12665.png

I think you might be right. I doubt they have rendered all the tiles though, it just takes up too much space to be worth it... http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tile_Disk_Usage

Looking at that same tile through my proxy (which is backed by the MapQuest map tiles), it is clearly different data.

Here is mapbox, which is also different... http://d.tiles.mapbox.com/v3/examples.map-vyofok3q/15/5242/1...

Do you know what underlying tiles Craiglist is proxying to? My impression is map{S}.craigslist.org is them rendering their own tiles from OSM data. But I'm not sure.

Correct.

Also fails to find my UK postcode. Fantastic.

Edit: Oh, it did, it just took a while. How strange.

Slightly off-topic, but if you're looking for the growl graphic overlay that Padmapper had, plus a bunch of other bells and whistles, check out Fivepad[1].

https://www.fivepad.me

Is anyone aware of a gmaps.js equivalent to OSM? http://hpneo.github.com/gmaps/

Maybe check out Leaflet: http://leaflet.cloudmade.com/

It works with many different tile providers, including OSM.

Leaflet, but really, if you want to do anything moderatly complex you would save alot of time by getting to grips with openlayers from the start

OSM uses postgres: http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2009/04/openstreetmap-moves-to...

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