Craigslist on Wednesday introduced a new Map View feature that displays the location of apartment listings across select cities. As The Next Web reports, the mapping feature is apparently rolling out on a gradual basis, and is currently available for apartment listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Ann Arbor, MI.

Craigslist began testing the service back in August, when it introduced embedded maps for individual listings in San Francisco and Portland, OR. Now, users can access Map View directly from the site's apartments and housing section, allowing them to identify available listings in a single glance. The display uses colored pins to mark the density of available apartments in a given area, though it's still a work in progress, as not all listings are mappable yet. Fortunately, users can still choose the browse with Map View or the traditional list view.

Bringing maps in-house

This week's rollout comes just a few months after Craigslist filed a lawsuit against PadMapper and its data provider 3Taps, on charges of copyright infringement and breach of contract. At the time, the site claimed that PadMapper and 3Taps illegally harvested its user-submitted listings to aggregate and map apartment locations, though 3Taps has since filed a countersuit, alleging that Craigslist has used anticompetitive practices to maintain a monopoly over the space.

Craigslist's Map View feature is powered by the Leaflet javascript library and utilizes data from OpenStreetMaps, one of the providers behind the new Maps application in iOS 6. The company has yet to announce a timeline for rolling out the feature across other cities.