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Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

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Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#4

Post by hack_edu »

slay2k wrote: post #3
antidaily wrote: post #2

Unfortunate, but predictable... as pointed out in your previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963634

Craig Newmark: "as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." What's predictable here ?

"A rule of thumb is a principle with broad application that is not intended to be strictly accurate or reliable for every situation."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_thumb

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#5

Post by rms »

slay2k wrote: post #3
antidaily wrote: post #2

Unfortunate, but predictable... as pointed out in your previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963634

Craig Newmark: "as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes." What's predictable here ?

Predictable is that craigslist seems to have some vendetta against external web apps, and you showed them a big data hole they had.

I'd ask Craig again on Twitter about the Pipes thing, he's better at responding to tweets than emails sometimes. http://twitter.com/craignewmark

Re: Craigslist blocks Yahoo Pipes

#7

Post by jeremymims »

For the life of me, I can't understand why craigslist has had this mentality. I basically have to chalk it up to Craig being stubborn. He was burned by ebay grabbing 20%, he hasn't changed the design ever, and may constantly live in fear of being co-opted by the man. But like it or not, Craigslist is the man. And when your users go out of their way to create pieces of software that actually improve the experience for your users (like letting me sort through the pile of duplicate, spam, and misleading listings) don't shut them down. Open up and help them. Craigslist lets people post their information for free in many cases, but for some strange reason won't let people take information out.

I had hoped that the culture might become more developer friendly after Jeremy Zawodny (formerly at Yahoo) joined up. Zawodny even wrote an article about how all this terrific data was available via RSS, but there was no good way to piece it together: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/008513.html

Craig is a programmer and he comes across as a normal, humble sort of guy. We like him and we like his service. I don't understand his obsession with keeping craigslist a) locked in the dark ages for functionality and b) not letting anyone build something that adds useful features. It really starts to make you think. Is he just strange or (if you don't give him the benefit of the doubt like I do) evil?

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