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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
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.
Yeah. Which is why he used RSS instead of scraping the web pages, and cached the data to avoid pounding the servers.
I don't understand what purpose it serves to prevent others from adding their own features to the site.
Simple - they have zero interest in letting someone else get between them and their market.
The only real "power" Craig has comes from the size of his userbase, and he knows that. If Company-X starts offering "Craigslist, now with Fleem(tm)", and somehow grows to serve a significant portion of the Craigslist user base, that gives Company-X power over Craigslist itself - They could potentially fork away on their own, rather than as a middle-man, and leave Craigslist itself a ghosttown.
As another point, Craig wants a totally vanilla interface, a fact that I think most of us appreciate (at the same time that it makes Web2.0 weenies cry, another fact that most of us appreciate). If for no more reason than petulantly insisting his users get the interface he wants, he has the option of making it as hard as possible for third parties to change that.
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.