Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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 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.
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
How so? You can't sue (well, successfully, anyway), someone for refusing them access to your network[1]. It is, after all, your network. The entire anti-spam (in which I work) and anti-virus industries basically revolve around that central principle: that a network or site operator gets to decide who is - and is not - allowed access, and said operator's decision is final. If Craigslist doesn't want to allow Yahoo Tubes access to their RSS feed, they are fully within their rights to deny it.
[1] Well, maybe, if it was a case of discrimination against an individual based on skin color, or some other form of legally prohibited discrimination, but in general, you can't sue because someone won't accept your email/let you access their website/etc.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Mashups are mostly cool because they look hard to implement. You look at them and think oh wow that's cool it looks like a desktop. Maybe you play with one for a few hours before forgetting about it. They're one of many things that seem like impressive technical achievements- but that no one really asked for- and that people tire of quickly.
The best example that comes to mind is that voice recognition feature that works over the phone. At first, you hear, "Press 1, or say... yes!" and you decide to say "yes" and it understands you. So you think oh wow that's cool... it can recognize my voice, how impressive. But really, you've seen enough, and afterward you always use touch tones as before. Until... voice recognition infects all the phone tree systems you use like a plague, and the touch tone option disappears! "The serial number you entered is XXXXX. Is that the correct number? Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no", or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" Now since I don't want the guy taking a dump in the next stall to hear me say "yes" and find out that I'm in there on a cellphone (ew) I try to get away with what worked in the good old days... pressing 1. "Sorry, I did not understand your answer. Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no, or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" ARRGH... People who are forced to undergo credit counseling under the terms of the recent bankruptcy reform law are put on the phone with these things, and have to sit there like idiots all day talking to them. It sounds like hell. Many cellphones also have voice recognition- you set it up so you can say "Mary" and it calls Mary and you think oh wow that's cool... but have you ever seen anyone use it? Me either. Mary has a bad reputation- I don't want you to know I'm calling her.
Drag and drop is another one. I can see drag and drop is useful in some situations. You drag a file to a folder, an icon to another window to open it there, etc. So everybody has to implement drag and drop everywhere, whether it makes sense or not, even though nobody outside a feature design meeting has ever asked for it. I have never wanted to drag and drop anything on any "web 2.0" site. But a lot of times my finger clicks the mouse by accident, and I find myself dragging a mouse pointer around that's pregnant with some strange little icon dragged from who knows where. I usually keep dragging it across the screen until I see it turn into that little "no not here" thingy and then I let go. Unless I'm too slow to catch it, and I get stuck trying to figure out WTF I just did and how I can undo it to get things back to the way they were.
Touchscreens- that's another example. When you first use one, you think, oh wow that's cool. Then you put your oily fingers all over it until all you see is a mash of filthy fingerprints dimly lit from underneath... and suddenly you realize those horrible little thumb keyboards weren't so bad after all.
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.
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).