Craigslist, that quaint digital home to unwanted couches and vacant two-bedroom bungalows, has begun attaching maps to some of its listings. That would be humdrum news if it were about any other website, but Craigslist is so famously hidebound, so trapped in the Netscape era, that even legal foes are cheering its maps as a sign of innovation.
The maps appear on housing listings in the San Francisco Bay Area and Portland, Oregon, and pull data from OpenStreet Map, a collaborative, freely licensed collection of directions and images. Craigslist joins Apple, Foursquare, and Wikipedia in preferring the open maps over embeddable maps from Google, as the Talking Points Memo reported.
But the bigger deal here is that 17-year-old Craigslist is experimenting with the sort of innovation it has long resisted. After moving from e-mail to the web in 1996, the site added search, self-posting, and a flagging system several years later. In the years since, it has stubbornly resisted enhancements like images on the index pages, multi-city search, and maps.
via Wired
August 29, 2012
