Proto Mashup: Craigslist, Yahoo! Pipes & Maps, And Email
http://www.protosw.com/mods/app/view/379
Here’s a full screen version: http://www.protosw.com/products/movies
This Proto mashup brings Craigslist, Yahoo! Pipes, Yahoo! Maps, and Microsoft Outlook together into one sweet apartment hunting and tracking mashup app.
First, I built a rich RSS feed using Yahoo! Pipes to query Craigslist in New York City for apartment listings (all brokers / fees too). The Yahoo! Pipe feed adds on (this functionality rocks) a Latitude / Longitude geo-coding if it can find anything that looks like an address in any of the fields in the RSS feed, in our case apartment listings. So I build a URL for CL with the right parameters to hit newyork.craigslist.com with apartment search terms, the listing offset (page in increments of 25), and how many bedrooms. For example: http://newyork.craigslist.org/search/…
Then using Yahoo! Pipes, we can build this URL with some simple inputs for query, bedrooms, and “s” (start offset). Pipes will output the new feed with only listings for which it can determine some lat/lon coordinates with reasonable probability. The Yahoo! Pipe outputs a REST interface like so:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/tiEOFaG4…
Step 2: Using Proto, query the Yahoo! Pipes REST API a number of times with multiple search phrases. For example, get the first 4 pages (100) results for each of “williamsburg”, “les”, and “lower east side”. Then Proto groups these all back together into a single feed for further display, storage, and analysis. This is nice since the Yahoo! Pipe service will usually only return about 25% of the results with legitimate geocoding. I built the multiple REST queries and aggregation functionality
sort of like the deep search example.
Step 3: Show all the listing results on a Yahoo! map. This makes it super easy to focus in on a certain neighborhood and ignore the “Williamsburg” listings that are past queens. Try it out… The map is shown using Adobe Flash right in Proto.
Then you decide what to do:
1. Eliminate / blacklist listings you never want to see again.
2. Save listings with additional info like:
Broker email, Broker phone, Broker Name, Comments, Rent, Other Monthly costs, Lease Term, broker fee, etc.
3. Analyze all your ’saved’ listings to calculate the total, all in monthly rent by adding up all the costs and averaging out the broker’s fee. Roommates are included into the monthly bill split.
4. If you need to light a fire because you’re the one actually driving the apartment search since your lease is up in 2 weeks and your slacker friends are doing nothign about it, grab a screenshot of the apartments you’ve found and send it via Outlook. To do this, Proto uses VBA to create a new Email message and then uses the VBA “SendKeys” to paste in the screenshot you take of the Yahoo! Map (taken right in Proto wiht the movie / screencap module).
That’s it. you have a full featured applic… er, mashup to help you find some new digs in NYC. Feel free to redirect the Pipes REST request to another city or search for that matter. I tried it out with “Free Stuff”, but there’s way less meaningful results. For sale items could work though… Give it a try.
