Seo, Make Money Online and Technology

If you are a program developer, maybe you should take a note about this. The web seems to be converging on several companies, like Facebook and Google, which are becoming more powerful and increasingly unrivaled. Yet, even these companies can’t afford to close off everyone else and have a very healthy ecosystem of companies and services developed around them. Still, there are those that are more reluctant to sharing their data and Craigslist is again proving to be one of these companies who built Flippity, which lets you plot Craigslist listings on a map. Flippity is using Yahoo Pipes to access Craigslist as a data source.

For those unfamiliar with Yahoo Pipes, it’s a nifty tool that allows you to take data from anywhere on the net, mash it up, parse it, and produce interesting results. One of its benefits is that it caches the data, so the original source does not get pummeled on every request.

Developer Romy Maxwell, one of the people behind Flippity, having an conversation via Email with founder CraigList,Craig Newmark to get his opinion on the way the project used and accessed the data. Initially, Newmark gave the project the thumbs up and it looked like everything was in the clear. He replied to one of the developer’s emails “as a rule of thumb, okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes,” which is what Flippity did.

Maxwell decided to follow up and give him the closed alpha link. Unfortunately 4 day after sending the link, he received no response, which is unusual as Craig responded keep working on it. And the biggest joke is Craigslist pulled the plug on Flippity and everyone else who was using Yahoo Pipes to access the data.

Maxwell says that he could have circumvented the blocking, but that it’s now worth the effort when other services are a lot more welcoming to third-party apps.

“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,” he wrote. “By the way, it’s not too hard to defeat any technical measure Craigslist can put up…There’s very little Craigslist would be able to do to counter. However, it’s just not worth my time. If Craigslist wants to keep its doors shut to the world, so be it.”