All Over Albany

Finding Craigslist on a map

A screengrab of the apartment listings map for part of Albany.

Check it out: The Albany Craigslist is now offering the option of displaying apartment listings -- as well as a few other types of items -- on a map.

It looks like the feature could be helpful if you're trying to find listings in specific neighborhoods. Though it's a bit hard to tell how precise the mapping is -- many apartment listings on Craigslist don't include specific address info (unless it's gathered on the backend and not shared publicly). Update: Based on Albany Landlord's comment, it sounds like that's how it works.

Craigslist apparently started testing this function in San Francisco and Portland this past summer, and the started gradually rolling it out in October. We only noticed it on the Albany version this week. [TPM] [The Next Web]

A map view of listings has been conspicuously absent from Craigslist for years. And in that time, another service -- PadMapper -- filled the void. Craigslist sued PadMapper over it this past summer, alleging it and a partner company had violated Craigslist copyright by scraping its listings. [The Verge]

It's a bit of a turn for Craiglist to be the disrupted instead of the disrupter. But it appears that it's been trying to evolve lately. In addition to the maps, it also added image previews for many of its listings, which make it a lot easier to skim through, say antiques, or whatever.

screengrab: Craigslist