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Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes
Romy Maxwell posted a blog piece on Craigslist apparently shutting off access to Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell was working on a project, one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source, for a (non-commercial) Pipes-based mashup. He sent Craig Newmark an invitation to the alpha test, after a few rounds of friendly communication — "...as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." The apparent response, 4 days later, was for Craigslist to redirect any request with an HTTP referrer of pipes.yahoo.com to the Craigslist home page. Maxwell writes: "It's a sad day for me. I'm not too upset about my own project, as Flippity was already removing Craigslist as a data source. With the likes of eBay and Oodle not only providing open APIs but encouraging and rewarding developers, spending my time wrestling with Craigslist is just plain stupid and exhausting. I'm sure I'm not the only person to have come to that conclusion, and I wish it were different. ... If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it."
here
Mashups... People still dabble with those?
I still don't know of anyone who actually uses them. None of the developers I know use them, even the ones they had created for themselves at one point. Most non-technical people still have no idea what mashups are.
I think we'll find cloud computing to be much like mashups; nothing but hype in the end. A few bloggers raved about them, the ones that were produced really didn't do anything useful, and they're soon forgotten about. A relic of the failed "Web 2.0" experiment, if you will.
I understand that Craigslist doesn't want to go out of it's way to make it's website more elaborate, (In fact, I appreciate it) but I don't understand what purpose it serves to prevent others from adding their own features to the site. (In the same way greasemonkey is so great) I wonder what they are trying to do with this move.
A bottle of Digital Draino will get those pipes unblocked quickly enough.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Craigslist want to make it moderately difficult to quickly access its listings for more than one location at a time. As soon as it becomes super easy to access listings and perform more powerful searches, then the spammers and corporations will move in and make craigslist into what ebay has become in recent years. I personally want craigslist to stay just how it is, and so I support any attempt to block access for silly things like Yahoo Pipes.
All this time I thought it was tubes.
Old wine in new bottles seems to be the constant theme of the computer business. We are always redefining old ideas with new monikers and names as if something drastic has changed. It's a sucker's game.
For example, the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is essentially a rewording of things that were going on in 1998, an era now called Web 1.0. I'm reminded of this only because I attended a social networking meetup (also called a meeting or gathering) and realized that all the buzz over social networking is really nothing new. You can read book after book about the social networking revolution and soon realize that these books are not much different than generalized "how to do marketing" books that floated around in the 1960s. The rules, the philosophies, the ideas are all old but re-jiggered to fit into the social networking meme.
This is the way the computer scene operates. Everything is gussied up to look hip and new when it's really putting lipstick on a pig. When all is said and done, the computer is good for a limited number of uses. These include calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing. That's it. Everything is a subset of those Big Five.
But when you boil computing down to five basic mechanisms, you have to constantly jazz up the categories with new terms. Word processing evolves into desktop publishing or blogging or content management, for example. It's all variations on the theme.
In the early days I would generalize about these same Big Five using early terminology. Back then, before it was actually boiled down, only "word processing" remained as a constant insofar as a naming convention is concerned. "Entertainment" was always referred to as "gaming." "Information retrieval" was "database management." "Calculations" were always "spreadsheets." There was no image manipulation in any serious way until the invention of Photoshop, and that was the last brick in the wall.
So if we are going to really boil down computers and try and project the future, it turns out to be rather simple. They get faster and faster and faster but not really any more useful (except for the fact that they are faster). This basic idea has been lost in the "there's an app for that" world of confused Web 2.0 jargon and the Intel Atom chip. The industry as a whole is losing its way. Each new development fails to increase performance Performance is the only thing important to the basic computer. All improvements such as newer and slicker versions of Photoshop, for example, require higher and higher performance machines. This holds true for networks and everything else. As performance increases things become more practical and easier to use. So where is the performance?
Part of the problem stems from the emergence of cheapskate computing. Getting the cheapest machine you can find that will manage to do the job--meaning it will boot an OS and actually run some sluggish apps.
When desktop computing got its start a good machine cost about $3,500, and to keep up with the technology you generally bought a machine every year or two and typically spent between $2,500 to $3,500 until the prices started to erode. By the time of the dot-com crash in 2000 a typical rig was selling for $1,500. Now its' gotten to the point where the median price is hovering around $800 and usable machines can be had for $400.
Instead of using Moore's Law to make machines more powerful, the "make them cheap" switch has been thrown and now everyone has a cheap machine in one form or another. The problem with cheap computing is that it's really not exciting. Moore's Law can affect performance, price and size. Size is the other direction the industry is going with the iPhone computing platform. This is another move away from the performance direction.
The trend, unfortunately, is not going to change. Once people get into cheap and small they seldom return to extravagance. So what do they do? They turn to old wine in new bottles. We'll just keep changing the name for everyth
scraping other websites' content over http is generally a huge waste of resources (and money) for that websites' operator, so unless you can give him something of considerable value in return (like Google does - I'll gladly serve 4 million pages/day to their bots if I get 200k visitors through Google in the same time, visiting my website and not just looking at my content somewhere else), be prepared to get locked out. Naturally, something you consider "a cool feature" isn't necessarily the sites' owner's idea of sufficient compensation. Perhaps some day ISPs will pay websites for the traffic and bill their clients for it, then websites might react differently.
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
i hope all these link agregators die. good stuff.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
tl;dr, got an executive summary?
Craigslist is basically run as a public service. They are well within their rights to block something that increases their bandwidth costs and has no benefit for them. Heck, the way the project was described, I'm not sure it had benefits for anyone!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Craigslist are doing fine without you, me and yahoo.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
In breaking news!! A new search website has been released called "Google"
The owner doesn't give a shit, it works.
In my opinion, the executive summary is that Craig Newmark values his notion of small, local communities more highly than he values money. I mean it in as cool and non-bleeding-heart a manner as possible.
He has the ability to direct the flow of visitors to his site to make money, or he has the ability to encourage what he sees as small, local communities basically unconnected to one another. He uses his site for the latter, and consequently forgoes substantial amounts of income. Sites that aggregate content or otherwise amalgamate the disconnected communities run afoul of his personal and, perhaps, business preferences.
Blocking some irresponsible Yahoo's pipes is the only way to stop it from reproducing.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
So this means that Craigslist has plugged up the portion of the Intertubes belonging to Yahoo? Sounds like lawsuit material!
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I would make the case that Craigslist makes money, rather than foregos it, because it does that.
Indeed, FTA:
In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post--we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right.
From their CEO.
They have 30 employees. 30.
Whomever has dicked up Slashdot's UI could learn a thing or two by browsing Craigslist after reading the above quote.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
While I can't comment on the logic behind the actions documented here, I can definitely say a word or two on what I believe to be the end of Craigslist's usefulness (at least for me).
About two years ago, I used Craigslist for everything. From iPhone purchases to small free stuff in my neighborhood (and others), Craigslist did it all. I even used its Personals section, which I actually had some success with (NO, not the NSA area...get your head out of there!).
Nowadays, every time I try to use Craigslist for those same purposes, I leave utterly disappointed. Almost every search I've run on the site has returned 95% SPAM. It's ridiculous that I can't trust a single entry because spam on there has gotten clever enough to resemble real listings. If you're even thinking of finding a mate on there, don't; it's a cesspool of fakes and cheap prostitutes. If I've left Craigslist for that reason, so has many other people, which means that it gets more noise, less hits.
I understand that the service is free, but let's put things in perspective. This very site sees ridiculously high traffic on a daily basis, yet does a very good job at moderating spam postings on EVERY discussion. We get dupes and stupidity, sure, but not (that much) spam.
Kind of sad, really. I shouldn't have to use eBay to buy something from a seller 5 miles away and hope that he's cool with local pickup...
(BTW: That project is awesome.)
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I've moved a lot the last few years. I find personally that craigslist was mostly genuine in areas with a lot of smaller towns, whereas in larger metro areas, it's generally loaded with spam and scams.
That being said, it's definitely easier to find yourself a happy ending massage parlor in the bigger areas.
Executive summary? Let me google that. Ahhhh. Executive summary. Something required by a pompous ass with delusions of grandeur. Such requirements are generally needed by lazy asses who can't or won't read, and are willing to burden their peers with doing the reading, thinking, and decision making, while taking all the credit for their peers work.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Google and MS are businesses that do far more than what Craig's list does. Even just with the software development, it takes far more than 30 people to do that at either company. Let alone the other work of promoting the products and doing the accounting. And even with the staff that MS has the company is probably, if anything, understaffed for the real needs. Had they had far more people working on developing software they'd probably have released there first 32bit only OS a couple years earlier.
But Craig is actually leveraging tech in the appropriate way if the goal is to do as much as possible with as little as possible.
That's the thing so many companies just don't get. They feel they need big teams. They think they need to spend this or that and have Flash and Flex and AJAX and all sorts of stuff. But sometimes simplicity, lightweight, and a small team can do amazing things.
Google and MS are businesses that do far more than what Craig's list does.
Well, ok, but you have to admit that single-handedly destroying the newspaper business model is pretty impressive. Not too many people can say they've collapsed an industry.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
They're not making nearly the same revenue per employee, though, so there seem to be some diminishing returns. Craigslist brings in somewhere around $6 million per employee, while Microsoft brings in about $600,000, and Google about $1.1 million.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The guy just has to do a scrape of the cache from the results of a google query of "site:craigslist.org" - it returns results from iowa, hawaii, san francisco, manila, singapore ...
Or scrape each cached result of a query based on each geographical area: "site:kansascity.craigslist.org", "site:losangeles.craigslist.org", etc.
Never need to hit the actual craigslist domain at all.
Craigslist is doing fine. There's only one!
:)
(/grammar police)
Now how am I supposed get an rss feed of local prostitutes...
Last time I tried to use Yahoo Pipes (on InstantWatcher.com), I couldn't build a pipe because Yahoo obeyed the robots.txt file. Redirecting based on referer seems like overkill when they can just change their robots.txt.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_plural#Discretionary_plurals
(/grammar police police)
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
30 sounds about right. I'm always flabbergasted to hear how many employees Google, or Microsoft have.
Estimated revenue of Craigslist in 2007 was $150 million, and mere $25 million in 2006. Net income of Microsoft in 2009 - the worst year ever, IIRC - was $14 billion. Net income of Google in 2008 was $4.2 billion.
(All figures are taken from Wikipedia)
Rupert Murdoch whines and complains about Google "stealing" traffic by bundling his content/data to work in different ways: Slashdotters get up in arms, saying he's "missing the point" or is somehow mentally defective and pushing a failed business model.
Craig Newmark shuts out Yahoo for unstated reasons: Slashdotters support him and think he's doing a great job, and should keep preventing other people from building apps that bundle his content/data to work in different ways.
Ah Slashdot, is there anything you can't be hypocritical about?
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Ultimately I just wrote my own setup that worked very much like Yahoo Pipes, but without the GUI to configure things (I just wrote perl code to do what I wanted) and it also did caching of the RSS feeds for a while and if there was an error it would simply work with the cached data rather than failing. Took a while to get right, but now that I have it working properly, I love it.
Craigslist leverages the Internet to provide a hell of a lot of service to a hell of a lot of people without doing much work at all. They skim a little money from some of those people and say that's enough.
Microsoft creates a lot of work for themselves by making lots of new features and then convincing people that they need them. It's how they leverage their advantage as the world's largest software company, and the rest of the industry (and lots of people doing OSS) fall for it.
Google is probably pretty much the same these days. The point is that these companies are worried about shareholder value first, they're worried about winning. That's why they make all this work for themselves. Craigslist just provides the service. Take it or leave it.
Not a mess. Just happens to be a little idiosyncratic - two years ago I tried to offer a complete web2.0y rebuild of their site for free and they refused! http://zwadia.com/
It goes without saying that scraping the cache for use in an app not using Google's official APIs is against Google's TOS. Wouldn't surprise me in the least if Google didn't ban the user agent for Pipes. They ban a whole bevy of other automation agents as it is.
Craigslist wants to disable mashups? Their prerogative. Or you might say it's Jim's prerogative (Craig owns the place, Jim runs it). Part of the no-frills approach also means going through the website and not some third party.
normally i hate when people say this but as an avid user of craigslist to buy/sell things without fees I couldn't agree with you, and the overall ethos of craigslist, more and wish I had mod points....
But Microsoft has 93,000 employees and $58 billion in revenue, and Google has 20,000 employees and $22 billion in revenue (I'm quoting revenue, seeing as wages come out of revenue, not out of profit).
So Craigslist pulls in $4,687,500 per employee, Microsoft $623,655 per employee and Google $1,100,000 per employee.
Don't forget that Craigslist likely has the lowest R&D costs and investment costs out of any of the three.
Maybe they went to your site without javascript enabled and weren't impressed with your "web2.0" skills?
Hint: keyword spamming is pathetic. Totally failing your site layout because of keyword spamming is just hilarious.
small, local communities basically unconnected to one another
You make it sound so wholesome. But it's really small, local communities of hookers, real-estate agents, and those looking for unusual, risky sex.
For Microsoft, their income mostly unrelated to what their tech employees are doing. Just look at what's been happening from Windows NT to Windows 7--mostly theming. Microsoft's success comes mostly from marketing and business "strategy" (aka questionable practices).
I see it's time to add a new moderation category: SPAM!
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
it's a wordpress site with nothing special done to it... quit whining I didn't even have this blog when we were exploring this.
I laughed the other day when a (much younger) workmate complained about automatically generated mails he had to handle: Thunderbird was very unresponsive when he opened those 100KB (~1700 lines) pure ASCII e-mails. The reason was apparently some badly installed/configured "Internet security" app, but it was hilarious to see him not find it unusual that his modern PC could not handle such text files and asking not have to work with them, when our 50-100 times slower PCs were handling them fine ~15 years ago. Perhaps the sluggishness of the Web in general has lowered people's expectations regarding the performance of PCs (esp. with web-based AJAX apps that try to provide faster deskop apps' functionality).
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
You're probably right about the Web 2.0 vs. Web 1.0 thing. But the rest of your post is just ignorant.
First, let's consider Moore's law. As it is based on the size of transistors it will come to an end. There is a physical limit to the size of transistors, just think about the size of an atom, for example.
Then your five usage categories for computers, namely calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing, are just wrong.
Computers can do exactly on thing, calculations. Every other use is derived from this. This aside let's look at your other four categories.
Entertainment - Sure this is one use, but nearly everything can and is used for entertainment. And entertainment was there long before computers so I don't see how this is a category for computer usage. Just think about books, theaters, sports, games and the like.
Information retrieval - You are right here, but you know database management is not the same as information retrieval. Information retrieval is a technology to retrieve information relevant to a specific topic. A database can be used for that, but database management is the technology used to optimise databases. Information retrieval includes crawlers to get the information, generation of an index, searching for relevant content for a given request, etc.
Image manipulation - This is just a subset of signal processing. Signal processing (including generation) comes down to generate and manipulate signals of arbitrary dimensions. If you are using 2 dimensions, these signals could be images, if you are using 1 dimension your signal could be an audio signal. So you are totaly ignorant to image generation, processing, audio manipulation, generation, processing, pattern matching, machine learning, ...
Word processing - This is true, I think.
Also you are forgetting about improving the efficiency in terms of energy consumption, lowering the entry barrier in terms of ease of use and cost, security, robotics, controlling factories, simulation (not for entertainment), autonomous systems and as pointed out before the most common use for computers, communication.
Therefore, as your assumptions are wrong, your conclusion is wrong. It seems you used a computer 20 years ago, never tried anything new and you are predicting the future with no imagination.
In computer science this is known as garbage in, garbage out.
Craigslist wants to disable mashups? Their prerogative.
Not really. They can try by banning user agents, but you can get around that easily.
As long as they give you their data they can't control how you use it.
create a middle page, that meta-refreshes to the craigs lists sub page.
The referer will not follow, problem solved!
Time spent on the site, the number of people who post--we're the leader.
You know who else has a ton of comments? Youtube.
Craigslist is full of inarticulate twats and the flat message mode makes any serious discussion nearly impossible.
Also annoying is the amount of censorship (This comment has been removed by moderators...) At least Slashdot (mostly) just hides stuff from casual view.
we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right.
It's like they stopped webdev in '96 or so. If they're successful, it's inertia.
I set up my e-mails to my boss and boss's boss in 2 sections, executive summary then detailed information. I pretty much know the things that they want but give the additional detail in case the need more info and I'm not present to answer questions.
Have you ever read something and thought "get to the point already"? When directors and above is wading through tons of e-mails executive summaries help move the process along faster.
open source sub sim. I might start coding again for this. http://dangerdeep.sourceforge.net/contribute/
That's why they don't allow browsing by images: bandwidth. They're providing the best service possible given the constraints they've adopted, and I happen to hope they don't change.
Really? Then why is the CAS section overrun with spammers, prostitutes, fags who troll gym locker rooms, and fags posing as women?
... startup, and then claim to be a non-commercial use. Is their plan to be another internet company with no way of making money?
My guess is they are just non-commercial while in development.
New low for anonymous cowards!
Best Slashdot Co
Insightful my ass, if you believe the most differences between windows NT and 7 come from the themes its time to pull your fucking head out of the sand.
Is that so shocking?
From TFA:
Craigslist's popularity and sheer functionality makes it an Internet and American national treasure and it will be a sad day when the company finally folds due to lacking interest from within.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Microsoft has collapsed a hell of a lot. They've hidden other stuff though (i.e. the Mainframe and Unix industry, beating strong but so many professionals clamor to scream how both are long dead).
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You mean suck dick without fees?
Support my political activism on Patreon.
You're probably one of the few people that actually understand what executives do and why they have multi-million-dollar salaries.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Definitely a very shrewd business decision on Craigslist's part. If you don't take risk (i.e. build new things, hire more people) you can keeping making money as long as your goods/services are deemed worthwhile. The great thing is with just 30 employees, they can adapt pretty quickly to changing market conditions that affect there very focused product, whereas Microsoft, while not just an Operating System maker, has a much tougher time moving from one direction to another. It's just a fact of having that big a company, you end up having to cut thousands of jobs because you can't wait for the behemoth to adapt and keep the stockholders happy. However, it does come down to the motivating factors for those at the helm and in control of the money. If craigslist had investors that were demanding billions in growth, chances are they'd have to expand into the hundreds and eventually thousands of employees to succeed. It sounds like, though, that they don't have that pressure, and if an average of 4.6million per employee per year in revenue makes everyone enough money along with keeping the company running well, that is a pretty sweet deal. Their biggest risk is the lack of diversity in offerings. Basically all of that revenue comes from a single source. While no one is currently predicting the demand for this type of service dropping significantly, competition in that space could creep in quickly and cause them some major trouble.
Yeah, we'll post it as soon as an "executive" shows up
I don't care why you're posting AC
Yahoo Pipes is a great idea, but making any production worthy project with it is asking for trouble. That thing is sooooo slow to process a feed. Roll your own, if you had a good idea to begin with leaving yahoo pipes out of the project will speed up the run time *10.
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Honestly? This is ridiculous. No, the MAIN changes are not themes. That's just apparently all you've noticed. I'm sure you're just being coy, but give me a break. Microsoft is imperfect enough on its own without people spreading complete nonsense. Give them credit when they earn it, for crying out loud.
"Those who would sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BenF
Guess I'll spending my day re-implementing Yahoo Pipes on my own server.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
In any event, Offtopic does cover it.
Once you start adding fancy features, the site starts becoming responsible for the content. The atmosphere on craigslist is one that, if you get screwed over, it's entirely your own fault. On eBay, people can run to customer support if there's a scam. On craigslist it's such a basic site that it gives a real atmosphere of all responsibility being placed on the users.
It makes sense to me.
They'll probably be reunited once Yahoo posts something in Missed Connections.
Don't forget that Craigslist likely has the lowest R&D costs and investment costs out of any of the three.
...not to mention operational costs (rent, utilities, etc.).
Vampire Squid (Yahoo Pipes) attaches to Craig's face and tries to draw and cash value into himself with its relentless blood funnel .
Craig stuffs garlic in its mouth and hammers a stake in it and throws it into the dawn light where it turns into a puff of smoke.
So I should feel bad for the bloodsucker?
A few years back, I was trying to use Yahoo Pipes on CL feeds, since CL's search sucks pretty badly. I quickly found that it was blocked.
So, I run a cron job that wgets the RSS feeds I want, twice a day, caching them on my server. Then I refer Yahoo Pipes to that cached version.
Works well for my needs, though obviously not for something as general as this.
they aren't in the same business though, so it's a flawed comparison. compare ebay and craigs and you might be more on the money
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Go look up the word "hyperbole" in a dictionary. And while you're at it, look up the word "coy" as well, since you seem to have trouble with the English language.
Nevertheless, how much effort Microsoft has put in under the covers really doesn't matter, what matters is how much Windows has improved for users. And for most users, Windows really is still just a Start menu, Explorer, IE, and Office, plus the occasional crash, virus, and incomprehensible dialog box.