> Craigslist is one of the poorest user experiences around and succeeds only because people insist on using it.
So, to paraphrase, it only succeeds because something about it attracts customers. As opposed to other sites, which succeed by fairy dust and rainbows.
If padmapper has a great user experience, that's wonderful -- They should be able to get customers to post their listings on it, and generate data without relying on Craigslist. Or, if they rely on Craigslist, and what the article said is true, they could have negociated a license to the data, instead of scraping it.
Why was Sourceforge so tough to displace, aside from no one having the will to do it?
Craigslist controls a two-sided market. If I build a new site, I can't get buyers without there already being sellers. And vice-versa. That's an incredibly difficult business problem.
Github seems to have had it easier. I can just host my new project on github and be done with it (my website links to it after all). I'm sure sourceforge had some value just by being the go-to place, but how strong was the network effect from a developer perspective?
To deconstruct the SourceForge decline, which felt as painfully slow as the glacially slow erosion of IE 6 market share, it's important to recognize it in context.
SourceForge and its related properties were the backbone of the early web, supporting a number of important efforts to which people felt a strong allegiance. It was like a benevolent force at the time.
SourceForge had, at the time, a fairly formal process for registration. They considered themselves more like a library where getting shelf space was a privilege not doled out lightly. This is not unlike how getting into the Yahoo! directory required a lot of begging and pleading.
While this meant that most of the projects hosted by it had a lot of merit, those lesser efforts were left out in the cold. They failed to switch to a more casual model as the "Web 2.0" philosophy started being the dominant mind-set, where expectations shifted dramatically from carefully curated content to emergent user-driven communities.
Also worth noting, GitHub's pace of innovation is so far beyond nearly anything else in the industry that it was only a matter of time before they became the superior platform in terms of technology.
Additionally they were able to ride the surge of popularity that git was gaining, something that SourceForge didn't support at the time, and persuaded a number of high-profile projects to move to them. The real coup was Ruby on Rails, which once hosted there, solidified their position.
Any Craiglist displacer would need to swing a few important, strategic deals to cement it in the minds of people as a reasonable alternative. The rest would be a case of just driving harder than Craiglist is willing to keep up with.
CL won because it got the first mover advantage, and now benefits greatly from network effects. It could be much improved over what it is, but it has little incentive to change now.
So because the private licensing terms offered were not optimal for PadMapper, it follows that PadMapper should just ignore their public licensing altogether?
So, to paraphrase, it only succeeds because something about it attracts customers. As opposed to other sites, which succeed by fairy dust and rainbows.
If padmapper has a great user experience, that's wonderful -- They should be able to get customers to post their listings on it, and generate data without relying on Craigslist. Or, if they rely on Craigslist, and what the article said is true, they could have negociated a license to the data, instead of scraping it.