Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
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Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#2I think the reason people here feel this way is because the general consensus among HN users is that the best product wins and that's all that matters. If a company has a monopoly on data and refuses to provide an API they're saying that they don't want to compete on the quality of their product (craigslist for example) they want to keep their position without the benefits to the users.
Padmapper made craigslist apartment searches much better, instead of making their own apartment searches better craigslist shut Padmapper's access to craigslist data down. It shows that they value their own business more than they value the experience of their users, which to a lot of people here isn't exactly "good".
Companies are free to do with their data whatever they want and they're free to restrict access to it however they like, sure, but it's still lame when a company does it because they don't want to improve their product and don't like competition.
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#3Choosing Pealk as the example in this very short rant is a classic Straw man argument. What about Padmapper?
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#4Hear, hear. With all the talk of "pivoting" and whatnot on HN, I'm really surprised at how many people are so utterly hostile to businesses changing course at Internet speed. Have your cake and eat it too, eh?
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#5But wouldn't it be nice?
Wouldn't we all better off as a whole if technology wasn't solely based on profit only?
I think that's the real question, and what started the whole "API" "open XXX", not "OMG I WANT IT /CRY/CRY" that the image suggests. Remember that most devs nowadays participate in open source projects and start to have different ethics than they used to have (which was, money > everything, and justifies all actions)
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#6All the mentioned companies form at least part of their business on data collected from their users. Not products or sevices formed of raw material. Even Netflix depends on its users' data heavily in order to run its recommendation system. So to expect that they allow the public, in the form of other companies providing other services based on said data, is not so unreasonable at all.
As a provider of data from which these companies make their profits, I believe it is entirely reasonable to demand that they make those data accessible to other services I'd like to use. Sadly the trend of the Internet has been away from open systems and toward siloed, proprietary data stores.
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#7I'm glad someone said it. It's foolish to develop a product exclusively with another company's API. But maybe Pealk was looking to get acquired all along? In that case this whole debacle has a valuable lesson in it: Don't build a feature, build a product.
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#8Correct. But, IMHO, they (Craigslists of the world) owe us, consumers. We're their eyeballs, customers, users, we bring them food, directly or indirectly. Well, at least for myself this is always the case, to greater or lesser extent: when I do something for a user, and user pays me, I feel somewhat obliged. If he pays me $5/mo, it doesn't mean that our contract is renewed from scratch every month. I feel obliged to do something that would entitle me to issue an invoice next month. It doesn't mean that I will bend over backwards for every user (it just doesn't scale) but nevertheless.
I mean that PodMapper was a service for Craigslist's users, first and foremost. And banning PodMapper means that Craigslist doesn't give a shit about us, its users. Do you really believe that PodMapper did any damage to Craigslist?
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#9Interesting perspective that I'm inclined to agree with. It seems that large companies with vast amounts of data or users are generally expected to give developers a way to interact, but the reality is that they have the ability and right to control access to said resources however they feel benefits their business best (or even reduces the amount of shit they need to monitor). I've always agreed with Calacanis that startups should not stake their business model on the good nature of a larger service (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc). It seems to me that if Ayn Rand were still around, she'd be writing tomes on the new generation of "data looters" - those who feel entitled to the hard earned data of the large faceless corporations that exist within our tech industry. "Sacrifice your data and business to us poor, helpless developers who are just looking for our next meal. It's for the good of the industry!," they cried.
Re: Craigslist, LinkedIn, Netflix, and others don't owe us anything.
#10I think the reason people here feel this way is because the general consensus among HN users is that the best product wins and that's all that matters. If a company has a monopoly on data and refuses to provide an API they're saying that they don't want to compete on the quality of their product (craigslist for example) they want to keep their position without the benefits to the users. Padmapper made craigslist apar…
If that's the general consensus of HN users I don't think many stand to make any money.