Craigslist is great when it comes to unloading junk or buying someone else's, but for browsing apartment listings it bites harder than dogs on mailman limbs.
HousingMaps.com made the experience more intuitive by combining Craigslist apartment listings in North America with Google Maps, in what's known as a mashup -- two Web services (usually) combined by a third party to make an entirely new site. Some other examples of mashups include
Chicagocrime.org, which fuses Google Maps with Chicago crime statistics, and
DoubleTrust.net, which allows you to search Google and Yahoo! simultaneously.
Now HousingMaps has a competitor,
MapsKrieg, which also joins together Craigslist and Google Maps. Like HousingMaps, MapsKrieg allows you to search a city for apartment listings, which get mapped out as points on the city grid -- much nicer than the pages of text results you get on Craigslist. Clicking on a point opens up a bubble with the listing title, pictures (if there are any), snippets from the original post as well as a direct link back to it.
Where MapsKrieg beats HousingMaps is in the number of cities that are searchable -- MapsKrieg covers hundreds of cities, where as HousingMaps is limited to just a few dozen major metropolitan areas. MapsKrieg's maps are also much bigger than those on HousingMaps, covering the entire browser window as opposed to just part of it.
Unfortunately, that's where the advantages end. MapsKrieg only allows you to filter results by city and housing type, whereas HousingMaps lets you choose a price range. And the reason HousingMaps's street grids don't take up the entire screen is because the site includes a box of descriptive text links, which scroll you to the listing on the map and open a window straight to the Craigslist posting.
In the end, MapsKrieg is great for anyone living outside of HousingMaps's metro areas -- not so much if HousingMaps already has you covered.
From Geek Sugar
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