It solves about 50% of the problem for me: the biggest frustration for me is not being able to quickly glance at a listing to see where it is. If I could open 20 Craigslist listings in 20 tabs and see a map in each, that mostly takes care of it for me.
It would be far better if that landing page were either a search page or listings-posting page. Most likely search (that's going to be most of your interest) with a link (or form) for posting.
I looked at it for 15 seconds (hey, I'm at my day job), couldn't figure it out, and left.
PadMapper and Craigslist both have a far better usability proposition.
Fivepad isn't a listings site, it's a bookmarking app. You plug in the URLs for the listings you find on other sites and it shows you them on a map and helps you coordinate with roommates.
Oh, I forgot to mention the bookmarklet. There's a bookmarklet. I see where you're coming from, though, but we've all seen what CL does to people who try to use their data. I believe Fivepad lives within the TOS boundaries, since it's not doing generalized scraping.
Yeah. I suppose if I was maintaining a list of URLs and could copy/paste them in bulk it might be OK. In which case I'd probably write my own scraper to search CL based on my own criteria and dump the raw links to plug in (a little lynxs or wget + awk).
CLMapper does the cool job though of showing all of a current page's results on a single map. Which, assuming the underlying geographic data are reliable, is helpful.
