Craigslist blocks Listpic

by Brad Linder Jun 8th 2007

For the past few months, you could use a 3rd party website to browse Craigslist by looking at pictures rather than text-based titles. In a lot of ways, Listpic made perusing classified ads far more useful. In fact, some users say they started spending far more time looking at Craigslist ads once they discovered Listpic.

That's why many users are complaining about Craigslist's decision to block the service yesterday. In a brief forum post, Craig Newmark wrote that the site was causing "a major bandwidth drain, slowing the site down for everyone else," and that there's "also one other major issue still under investigation, where we have yet to determine who's responsible."

Interestingly, Newmark comments that he did like Listpic's visual aspect, so it'll be interesting to see if Craigslist eventually works out some sort of a deal with the site or implements its own graphical browsing element.

Looking at Craigslist's terms of use, it appears that the company has reserved the right to delete accounts, block email or IP addresses, or generally terminate service for pretty much any reason. That's not to say they didn't have a reason. The terms of use also forbid "creation of derivative works from or redistribution of the site or the collective work." No matter how useful Listpic was, it clearly falls under tha category of a derivative work, and it's remarkable that Craigslist didn't block the service sooner.

Tags: craigslist, listpic

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Azazello said 12:18PM on 6-08-2007

I smell an acquisition in the works. Craigslist could use some fresh ideas/paradigms in its business.

Pknel said 1:07PM on 6-08-2007

@ 1. Are you saying you don't like the 1995 look and feel of craigslist? That's one of my favourite things about but I do agree that they also need a more visually appealing mode of relating the site's content.

R said 10:31PM on 6-08-2007

Haha..Exactly! The HTML 1.0 design is what makes Craigslist so useful and fast. But I wish they would add more search filtering options. Sometimes there's lots of junk to wade through.

Matt said 3:47PM on 6-26-2007

I shop online all the time looking for different classified ads and came across picstar.com. Check it out!

Roger Mason said 5:16PM on 7-05-2007

I just came across a similar solution at
http://cl.radiux.com.
They seem to have a couple of additional features such as list ratings. Seems to still be in Alpha but looks really promising.

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