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."

Pipes?

[Anonymous Coward]

All this time I thought it was tubes.

One Yahoo is enough

[GaryOlson]

Blocking some irresponsible Yahoo's pipes is the only way to stop it from reproducing.

Re:I Wonder...

[drinkypoo]

As a person willing to drive to get what I want, I am saddened and dismayed that I cannot search within x miles. A simple interface is one thing; lacking important and useful features is a huge failure, and the minute something else comes along that is craiglist plus a worthy search, craigslist is over.

Fow what it's worth...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've moved a lot the last few years. I find personally that craigslist was mostly genuine in areas with a lot of smaller towns, whereas in larger metro areas, it's generally loaded with spam and scams.

That being said, it's definitely easier to find yourself a happy ending massage parlor in the bigger areas.

Re:the rationale involved has already been explain

[tsm_sf]

Google and MS are businesses that do far more than what Craig's list does.

Well, ok, but you have to admit that single-handedly destroying the newspaper business model is pretty impressive. Not too many people can say they've collapsed an industry.

Re:The reason is obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

The posting interface is so simple that even my grandma can whip up an ad with a picture and get responses to it in no time.
Now I know who is posting granny-with-whip-4mmmm

Re:Mashups... Last year's cloud computing.

[Chosen Reject]

I'm the same way. More often than not, when websites do that, I stop reading and try never to come back to their site again. Other times I'll add what ever bit of javascript or whatever it is from the site. It's one reason why I hate snopes.com. You can't highlight their text. Who goes to the trouble of making text unhighlightable? I'll often highlight words or phrases right click and select 'Search Google for "$highlighted_words"'. Snopes makes that difficult. But the other day I was on a site (I can't remember which one right now) and tried highlighting some text to search more about it in Google and they actually had a pop up dialog box that said their content was copyrighted and they didn't allow copying. Out of spite I hit Ctrl-U, got the source for the page and the copied what I wanted while yelling out "Stop me from copying now!" My wife looked at me weird.