7450806
story
Comments: 164 +- News: Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes on Tuesday December 01, @09:32PM
Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday December 01, @09:32PM
from the nose-meet-knife dept.
from the nose-meet-knife dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topiccensorship.gif); width:44px; height:55px;
censorship
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicyahoo.gif); width:115px; height:23px;
yahoo
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicnews.gif); width:60px; height:66px;
news
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."
Because I don't need to worry about finances I can ignore Microsoft
and take over the (computing) world from the grassroots.
-- Linus Torvalds
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.
the rationale involved has already been explained (Score:5, Informative)
here [wired.com]
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:4, Insightful)
Craigslist are doing fine without you, me and yahoo.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
The guy just has to do a scrape of the cache from the results of a google query of "site:craigslist.org" - it returns results from iowa, hawaii, san francisco, manila, singapore ...
Or scrape each cached result of a query based on each geographical area: "site:kansascity.craigslist.org", "site:losangeles.craigslist.org", etc.
Never need to hit the actual craigslist domain at all.
Re: (Score:2)
The owner doesn't give a shit, it works.
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:5, Insightful)
In my opinion, the executive summary is that Craig Newmark values his notion of small, local communities more highly than he values money. I mean it in as cool and non-bleeding-heart a manner as possible.
He has the ability to direct the flow of visitors to his site to make money, or he has the ability to encourage what he sees as small, local communities basically unconnected to one another. He uses his site for the latter, and consequently forgoes substantial amounts of income. Sites that aggregate content or otherwise amalgamate the disconnected communities run afoul of his personal and, perhaps, business preferences.
Parent
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:5, Insightful)
I would make the case that Craigslist makes money, rather than foregos it, because it does that.
Indeed, FTA:
In all the complaints and requests we get from users, this is never one of them. Time spent on the site, the number of people who post--we're the leader. It could be we're doing one or two things right.
From their CEO.
They have 30 employees. 30.
Whomever has dicked up Slashdot's UI could learn a thing or two by browsing Craigslist after reading the above quote.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:5, Informative)
They're not making nearly the same revenue per employee, though, so there seem to be some diminishing returns. Craigslist brings in somewhere around $6 million per employee, while Microsoft brings in about $600,000, and Google about $1.1 million.
Parent
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:5, Informative)
Craigslist leverages the Internet to provide a hell of a lot of service to a hell of a lot of people without doing much work at all. They skim a little money from some of those people and say that's enough.
Microsoft creates a lot of work for themselves by making lots of new features and then convincing people that they need them. It's how they leverage their advantage as the world's largest software company, and the rest of the industry (and lots of people doing OSS) fall for it.
Google is probably pretty much the same these days. The point is that these companies are worried about shareholder value first, they're worried about winning. That's why they make all this work for themselves. Craigslist just provides the service. Take it or leave it.
Parent
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:5, Insightful)
But Craig is actually leveraging tech in the appropriate way if the goal is to do as much as possible with as little as possible.
That's the thing so many companies just don't get. They feel they need big teams. They think they need to spend this or that and have Flash and Flex and AJAX and all sorts of stuff. But sometimes simplicity, lightweight, and a small team can do amazing things.
Parent
Re:the rationale involved has already been explain (Score:5, Interesting)
But Microsoft has 93,000 employees and $58 billion in revenue, and Google has 20,000 employees and $22 billion in revenue (I'm quoting revenue, seeing as wages come out of revenue, not out of profit).
So Craigslist pulls in $4,687,500 per employee, Microsoft $623,655 per employee and Google $1,100,000 per employee.
Don't forget that Craigslist likely has the lowest R&D costs and investment costs out of any of the three.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Have you ever read something and thought "get to the point already"? When directors and above is wading through tons of e-mails executive summaries help move the process along faster.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe they went to your site without javascript enabled and weren't impressed with your "web2.0" skills?
Hint: keyword spamming is pathetic. Totally failing your site layout because of keyword spamming is just hilarious.
I Wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
waste of resources/traffic ... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:waste of resources/traffic ... (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
TFS states explicitly that they were "one of 2,111 using Craigslist as a data source". So even if they were nice enough to cache everything, that doesn't mean all the Yahoo pipes users where. From the perspective of Craigslist there is probably no way to distinguish between them, so it only takes one malicious (or more likely, stupid) scraper to ruin it for everybody.
I think Yahoo pipes is, in retrospect, not such a great idea really.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you had read the summary (or the article), they weren't screen scraping - it was the rss feed.
Re:I Wonder... (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple - they have zero interest in letting someone else get between them and their market.
The only real "power" Craig has comes from the size of his userbase, and he knows that. If Company-X starts offering "Craigslist, now with Fleem(tm)", and somehow grows to serve a significant portion of the Craigslist user base, that gives Company-X power over Craigslist itself - They could potentially fork away on their own, rather than as a middle-man, and leave Craigslist itself a ghosttown.
As another point, Craig wants a totally vanilla interface, a fact that I think most of us appreciate (at the same time that it makes Web2.0 weenies cry, another fact that most of us appreciate). If for no more reason than petulantly insisting his users get the interface he wants, he has the option of making it as hard as possible for third parties to change that.
Parent
Re:I Wonder... (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Yeah I don't care if that free couch is in $TOWN I only care if it's with in $DISTANCE from $HOME. And I don't care if that apartment is on $STREET I just want to know if it's within $DISTANCE2 from $WORK... Maybe that'll be my million dollar website and I shouldn't post it, but on the other hand I'd be fine with better location awareness if someone else did it...
Re: (Score:2)
That's contrary to Craig's preference for fostering small, local communities that do deal primarily within $TOWN, though, which is why he goes out of his way to structure his site that way, and block people who try to restructure the listings in other ways.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Just keep in mind that it's against Craigslist's AUP to access Craiglist any way other than directly with a browser, so your above example is an AUP violation as far as Craigslist is concerned. And of course, if Craigslist made intelligent use of metadata, they could use google maps (for free) to get location-aware features. Unfortunately, they have no metadata to speak of, so the listing format is the same for a car or a cheeseburger. This is probably why they're not more popular.
Craigslist is stupid becau
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
More popular than what?
eBay. Okay, okay, I kid. But seriously, Craigslist could easily be several times its current size if it just offered features that cause people to want to use other services. Lack of location awareness is my number one (with all that it entails.) It makes me look on eBay before I search other-region craigslists, for example; if I want to list something that I expect someone out of my area may want to buy, I won't even consider listing it on CL.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Very true. Craigslist is the new classifieds section for cars (I just bought my car from a craigslist ad actually). But I had to use crazedlist.org to search, because I was willing to drive as far as needed to get the car I wanted. Craigslist's lack of features and resistance to third party addons breeds sites like crazedlist, a complete hack relying on iframes and you turning off referrals in your browser. And crazedlist itself sucks, it just adds an obvious feature that craigslist refuses to add.
Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)
I understand that Craigslist doesn't want to go out of it's way to make it's website more elaborate, (In fact, I appreciate it) but I don't understand what purpose it serves to prevent others from adding their own features to the site. (In the same way greasemonkey is so great) I wonder what they are trying to do with this move.
Greasemonkey is great... until you get some vague but insistent problem report regarding your site, and after spending significant time trying to figure out why the HECK this particular user insists a particular site function is "broken in Firefox", you eventually figure out he's a Greasemonkey user and has no idea what he's doing.
Not that I'm bitter or anything.
The reason is obvious (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I hate to say it, but Craig's List has been a spam haven for some time. Some parts of better than other, but at least 90% (really) of everything in the personals section is pure, 100% spam and scam. Very little of the community section is real now, too.
Re:The reason is obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
I hate to say it, but Craig's List has been a spam haven for some time. Some parts of better than other, but at least 90% (really) of everything in the personals section is pure, 100% spam and scam.
Same with housing, at least in New York Cty. It's almost all shady brokerage firms (one was a total bait and switch job) that neglect key details, such as addresses, in their listings. Trying to find something near school when the neighborhood option for craiglist encompasses about 40-60 blocks on the west side is some what fruitless. I love craigslist in theory, but sometimes I wish the rules were a bit stiffer.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
It's almost all shady brokerage firms (one was a total bait and switch job) that neglect key details, such as addresses, in their listings.
Via the Craigslist TOU [craigslist.org], it's your responsibility as a reader to flag [craigslist.org] bad ads. Community moderation is the price we all pay for Craigslist to remain as (mostly) free as it is. If spammers are able to keep ads up, it's because people--possibly people like you--aren't flagging bad ads.
Re:The reason is obvious (Score:4, Informative)
It gets disheartening to flag 30 bad ads in a row from the same user only to come back the next day and see the same user with another 100+ bad ads. You get burnt out and just give up after a while.
I'm speaking from experience searching the real estate ads in places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas where a handful of brokers keyword spam their ads with the name of every single town and neighborhood in the entire area. In my case it became a lot more worthwhile to find something unique about the keyword spammers and add that as a negative search option rather than flag every bad ad that I happened upon from using a more naive search.
Parent
Re:The reason is obvious (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Going Nowhere Sort of Fast (Score:4, Interesting)
Old wine in new bottles seems to be the constant theme of the computer business. We are always redefining old ideas with new monikers and names as if something drastic has changed. It's a sucker's game.
For example, the so-called Web 2.0 revolution is essentially a rewording of things that were going on in 1998, an era now called Web 1.0. I'm reminded of this only because I attended a social networking meetup (also called a meeting or gathering) and realized that all the buzz over social networking is really nothing new. You can read book after book about the social networking revolution and soon realize that these books are not much different than generalized "how to do marketing" books that floated around in the 1960s. The rules, the philosophies, the ideas are all old but re-jiggered to fit into the social networking meme.
This is the way the computer scene operates. Everything is gussied up to look hip and new when it's really putting lipstick on a pig. When all is said and done, the computer is good for a limited number of uses. These include calculations, entertainment, information retrieval, image manipulation, and word processing. That's it. Everything is a subset of those Big Five.
But when you boil computing down to five basic mechanisms, you have to constantly jazz up the categories with new terms. Word processing evolves into desktop publishing or blogging or content management, for example. It's all variations on the theme.
In the early days I would generalize about these same Big Five using early terminology. Back then, before it was actually boiled down, only "word processing" remained as a constant insofar as a naming convention is concerned. "Entertainment" was always referred to as "gaming." "Information retrieval" was "database management." "Calculations" were always "spreadsheets." There was no image manipulation in any serious way until the invention of Photoshop, and that was the last brick in the wall.
So if we are going to really boil down computers and try and project the future, it turns out to be rather simple. They get faster and faster and faster but not really any more useful (except for the fact that they are faster). This basic idea has been lost in the "there's an app for that" world of confused Web 2.0 jargon and the Intel Atom chip. The industry as a whole is losing its way. Each new development fails to increase performance Performance is the only thing important to the basic computer. All improvements such as newer and slicker versions of Photoshop, for example, require higher and higher performance machines. This holds true for networks and everything else. As performance increases things become more practical and easier to use. So where is the performance?
Part of the problem stems from the emergence of cheapskate computing. Getting the cheapest machine you can find that will manage to do the job--meaning it will boot an OS and actually run some sluggish apps.
When desktop computing got its start a good machine cost about $3,500, and to keep up with the technology you generally bought a machine every year or two and typically spent between $2,500 to $3,500 until the prices started to erode. By the time of the dot-com crash in 2000 a typical rig was selling for $1,500. Now its' gotten to the point where the median price is hovering around $800 and usable machines can be had for $400.
Instead of using Moore's Law to make machines more powerful, the "make them cheap" switch has been thrown and now everyone has a cheap machine in one form or another. The problem with cheap computing is that it's really not exciting. Moore's Law can affect performance, price and size. Size is the other direction the industry is going with the iPhone computing platform. This is another move away from the performance direction.
The trend, unfortunately, is not going to change. Once people get into cheap and small they seldom return to extravagance. So what do they do? They turn to old wine in new bottles. We'll just keep changing the name for everyth
Re: (Score:2)
And I appreciate that you did! You took the words out of my mouth.
When I was a bit younger, I remember being all sorts of excited over the newest processors, graphics cards and all of those whiz-bang devices. The performance boosts you could get from overclocking your CPU, for instance, actually made a difference between tolerable and FLYING FAST, which let you do things with your computer that you couldn't do before (at least acceptably). Linux was nowhere near as complete as now, so getting that to work w
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Let me fix that for you ...
When desktop computing got its start a turdle machine cost about $3,500, and a good one was double that. (And the definition of "good" was something that today you'd be ashamed to have sitting in your garbage can on collection day).
*grumble* You kids nowadays *grumble*
one less link aggregator (Score:2)
Too much extra traffic (Score:2, Insightful)
Craigslist is basically run as a public service. They are well within their rights to block something that increases their bandwidth costs and has no benefit for them. Heck, the way the project was described, I'm not sure it had benefits for anyone!
One Yahoo is enough (Score:4, Funny)
Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes (Score:2)
So this means that Craigslist has plugged up the portion of the Intertubes belonging to Yahoo? Sounds like lawsuit material!
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
How so? You can't sue (well, successfully, anyway), someone for refusing them access to your network[1]. It is, after all, your network. The entire anti-spam (in which I work) and anti-virus industries basically revolve around that central principle: that a network or site operator gets to decide who is - and is not - allowed access, and said operator's decision is final. If Craigslist doesn't want to allow Yahoo Tubes access to their RSS feed, they are fully within their rights to deny it.
[1] Well, maybe,
Back in the days that Craigslist was useful... (Score:5, Interesting)
While I can't comment on the logic behind the actions documented here, I can definitely say a word or two on what I believe to be the end of Craigslist's usefulness (at least for me).
About two years ago, I used Craigslist for everything. From iPhone purchases to small free stuff in my neighborhood (and others), Craigslist did it all. I even used its Personals section, which I actually had some success with (NO, not the NSA area...get your head out of there!).
Nowadays, every time I try to use Craigslist for those same purposes, I leave utterly disappointed. Almost every search I've run on the site has returned 95% SPAM. It's ridiculous that I can't trust a single entry because spam on there has gotten clever enough to resemble real listings. If you're even thinking of finding a mate on there, don't; it's a cesspool of fakes and cheap prostitutes. If I've left Craigslist for that reason, so has many other people, which means that it gets more noise, less hits.
I understand that the service is free, but let's put things in perspective. This very site sees ridiculously high traffic on a daily basis, yet does a very good job at moderating spam postings on EVERY discussion. We get dupes and stupidity, sure, but not (that much) spam.
Kind of sad, really. I shouldn't have to use eBay to buy something from a seller 5 miles away and hope that he's cool with local pickup...
(BTW: That project is awesome.)
Re: (Score:2)
It is hard to find a spouse on CL, but easy to find a widget on eBay.
There is a lot of spam on a commercial services and stuff for sale site where people to go spend money, but not much on a tech discussion site.
Oranges are orange and apples are not.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
About 50% of the craigslist ads I've responded to were from the same scammer, who tried to get me to paypal them "because they were out of town". Unfortunately, craigslist doesn't have a "fraud" flag, nor are they doing anything to prevent this kind of fraud spam. I tend to look at my local listings every day and the percentage which is the same crap that the same idiots have been spreading across twelve posts (like the dipshit parting his VW camper... and listing every part separately) for months now has o
Fow what it's worth... (Score:2, Funny)
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.
Did this long ago ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ultimately I just wrote my own setup that worked very much like Yahoo Pipes, but without the GUI to configure things (I just wrote perl code to do what I wanted) and it also did caching of the RSS feeds for a while and if there was an error it would simply work with the cached data rather than failing. Took a while to get right, but now that I have it working properly, I love it.
Re:Mashups... Last year's cloud computing. (Score:4, Insightful)
The best example that comes to mind is that voice recognition feature that works over the phone. At first, you hear, "Press 1, or say... yes!" and you decide to say "yes" and it understands you. So you think oh wow that's cool... it can recognize my voice, how impressive. But really, you've seen enough, and afterward you always use touch tones as before. Until... voice recognition infects all the phone tree systems you use like a plague, and the touch tone option disappears! "The serial number you entered is XXXXX. Is that the correct number? Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no", or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" Now since I don't want the guy taking a dump in the next stall to hear me say "yes" and find out that I'm in there on a cellphone (ew) I try to get away with what worked in the good old days... pressing 1. "Sorry, I did not understand your answer. Please say 'yes' for yes, 'no' for no, or... 'I'm not sure' if you're not sure!" ARRGH... People who are forced to undergo credit counseling under the terms of the recent bankruptcy reform law are put on the phone with these things, and have to sit there like idiots all day talking to them. It sounds like hell. Many cellphones also have voice recognition- you set it up so you can say "Mary" and it calls Mary and you think oh wow that's cool... but have you ever seen anyone use it? Me either. Mary has a bad reputation- I don't want you to know I'm calling her.
Drag and drop is another one. I can see drag and drop is useful in some situations. You drag a file to a folder, an icon to another window to open it there, etc. So everybody has to implement drag and drop everywhere, whether it makes sense or not, even though nobody outside a feature design meeting has ever asked for it. I have never wanted to drag and drop anything on any "web 2.0" site. But a lot of times my finger clicks the mouse by accident, and I find myself dragging a mouse pointer around that's pregnant with some strange little icon dragged from who knows where. I usually keep dragging it across the screen until I see it turn into that little "no not here" thingy and then I let go. Unless I'm too slow to catch it, and I get stuck trying to figure out WTF I just did and how I can undo it to get things back to the way they were.
Touchscreens- that's another example. When you first use one, you think, oh wow that's cool. Then you put your oily fingers all over it until all you see is a mash of filthy fingerprints dimly lit from underneath... and suddenly you realize those horrible little thumb keyboards weren't so bad after all.
Parent