You may notice that a lot of duller-looking markers have appeared on the map. What’s going on? I’m trying something new out.
Since the Beginning…
Since the beginning, PadMapper’s policy has been to show only the listings where it’s confident in the location of the listing. This means that listings with an address like “W 24th St., New York, NY” were never shown, since they could be anywhere on the West half of Manhattan at the 24th St. level. If you care about the exact location of your place, that was no good. So, PadMapper showed just the high quality stuff.
This created a problem, though – some people decided they couldn’t rely on PadMapper alone, since it wasn’t showing everything available. This went doubly for the alerts. Something had to be done.
Now, when PadMapper’s not sure about the location of a place, it will still be shown, but instead of bright red, the marker will be a washed-out shade of red, indicating that it’s a second-class citizen in the map world, and that that rental isn’t necessarily right at that spot. The street view and walk score tabs aren’t necessarily going to be very representative… use them at your own risk.
So that takes care of the ones with crummy addresses. What about listings without addresses, you ask?
I’ve got something for you there, too – now PadMapper now tries to infer the location of an address-less place based on its neighborhood and city. It’ll appear somewhere in the neighborhood, and it’ll come up in alerts, but don’t expect the street it’s on on the map to be the one it’s on in reality.
To make sure you don’t mistake these for the more precise ones, not only is the marker color different, but the listing bubble has a big red and bolded “Location is Approximate” on the ones it’s not sure about.
I’ll probably add a filter to let you select whether the imprecise ones get shown, so that you can be picky at first, and then you can get less picky if you run out of high quality ones to browse through.
Please let me know if you love or hate the change by dropping me some mail at padmapper@gmail.com.
Happy hunting, and tell your friends!
Eric
I mentioned in my survey feedback that these new markers were frustrating because they were occasionally very far off the mark. I was sort of expecting there to be a way for me to actually correct the placement of these on the PadMapper map. Is this possible or a feature in progress?