Can't anyone build an alternative to craigslist? It may not get as famous but if it actually stood for the openness described in that article it would be a hit with most of us at least.
An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
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Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#42Fundamentally different from other scraping sites. This is a client-side browser extension to extract your own content that you posted. I haven't read the TOS but users should retain ownership of their own content (as in, it's a good business practice that endears users). Petty move on the part of Craigslist.
Really patronizing tone though and I bet that will backfire on them.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#43The tone of this letter is horrible IMO. I understand you're angry, but I imagine this will piss him off more than rile him up. I'd rather see you take them to court with a strong case than start a public, one-sided flame war. There must be a syndicate of investors that realize it would beneficial for them in the long-run to see Craigslist lose the stronghold they have on classified's data. PG (submitted this) and Ga…
I think it's a good letter. Up until now, I wasn't aware that Craig's List had moved in such a contentious and litigious direction. It sounds like instead of innovating and improving their service, CL is spending its time trying to squash anybody who tries to add value to their product. They have a right to do what they want as a business, but I also have a right to judge their practices and protest with my voice and my wallet. I get turned off by overly whiny and emotional complaint letters, but I found this one more factual than emotional. I will be avoiding use of Craig's List's services until I feel like they are allowing people to innovate off their platform and ceasing to try to own their users' content.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#44craigslist's position is pretty clear, whether they publicly admit it or not: they don't want, and will aggressively work to prevent, other companies attempting to bootstrap themselves off craigslist's content. I don't know why we have to all pretend we're shocked about this.
I think you mean craiglist's users' content.
Shouldn't the user have the right to do what they want with the classified ad they wrote?
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#45I wish someone would actually go to court vs. Craig; they're not as bad as Intellectual Ventures, but only because copyright law sucks somewhat less than patent law.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#46A thousand startups and every newspaper have failed to topple craigslist-- but maybe their own over-litigiousness will (finally!) be the downfall.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#47Can't anyone build an alternative to craigslist? It may not get as famous but if it actually stood for the openness described in that article it would be a hit with most of us at least.
Many people have built alternaives to Craigslist. For example, Gumtree, which is popular in the UK.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#48I wish someone would actually go to court vs. Craig; they're not as bad as Intellectual Ventures, but only because copyright law sucks somewhat less than patent law.
Uh, please do flesh out the comparison between a company that essentially pays law firms to sue people for using ideas and a company that builds a classifieds site and then refuses to let people build other businesses on top of that site.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#49It's important to note that this is, at first glance, a different beast than the padmappers/3Taps issues, which were primarily about scraping craigslist data and placing it on a different site. Krrb has users press a button, which scrapes a given post. The end result is the same -- the same data as Craigslist being displayed on a different site -- but this is coming from the Krrb users' own volitions, which I think m…
I think this is the same issue as Padmapper, just on a much smaller scale. Don't write code that will re-display/re-post content of a Craigslist post on your 3rd party website. I bet if the button were changed to just cut/paste an html link to .craigslist.org/post all would be well. This is just CL trying to keep their postings exclusive to their website of which they've spent many a time and money trying to build an…
The question is whose data is it? Padmapper just scraped whole site for apartment listings. This is an action by the user to take their post, which they wrote, and redisplay it somewhere else.
If I write an ad for a chair I want to sell, I should be able to post it to Craigslist and any other site I want to. The Krrb button is no different than the user manually copying and pasting her own content into Krrb's posting form.
Re: An Open Letter to Craig Newmark
#50craigslist's position is pretty clear, whether they publicly admit it or not: they don't want, and will aggressively work to prevent, other companies attempting to bootstrap themselves off craigslist's content. I don't know why we have to all pretend we're shocked about this.
I think you mean craiglist's users' content. Shouldn't the user have the right to do what they want with the classified ad they wrote?
Sure, they have the right to post their content anywhere they want, but after that it's CL's. Same is true with comments, posts on discussion/Q&A sites, etc.