Hold on here, let's call a spade a spade. Your project has its own doofy .com name, calls itself "alpha", and was rolled out on a web site whose primary function is to connect people who are trying to launch online business ventures. So to wave the bloody shirt after Craig stated that RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes are golden, is a little disingenuous.
As others have pointed out, Craig's whole m.o. appears to be preventing people from building for-profit businesses on top of his site. Craig is anti-business. That's his prerogative. You obviously disagree with his philosophy, but a difference of opinion is not cause to go around calling somebody evil. He's done more good through his site and the $$ he generates off his site (which gets plowed into his foundation) than you, me and the next 100 people who read this combined.
It's safe to assume the site makes a whole lot more than $650k/year, so not a whole lot of it goes to the foundation. Where do you think the rest of the money is going?
It would only be disingenuous if there was any kind of commercial aspect to the site as it stands. There was none, and "rolling it out" on HN is merely asking for feedback, not trying to sign up paid users.
In the email exchange I've had with Craig, not all of which I've posted, I've asked him to clarify on this point:
"Oh, and about being noncommercial. A bunch of the RSS mashup sites I've seen, like Craiglook, throw up advertising presumably to cover server costs or make a few bucks. If I didn't want to go that route, would asking for donations be acceptable ?"
In his response, he said he can ask. I said please do, and that was the end of it. So for CL to break things when there is absolutely no sign of commercial purpose is a little unnecessary in my eyes.
I hate to break it to you, but it doesn't matter if there is no 'sign' of commercial purpose. Are you a non-profit? If you are, let them know. In my experience they'll hear you out.
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?
This is total conjecture on my part, but part of this mentality might lie in the fact that Craigslist is user-moderated. You shouldn't be circumventing the duplicate, spam, and misleading entries (which helps only you) you should be seeing and flagging them for removal (which helps everyone).
I like to think that Craigslist isn't free, I just pay for it with my time and attention by flagging the junk that doesn't belong there.
That's an interesting point but that still doesn't explain why he would be against someone else doing it another way.
Craig very famously types the command "sweep the leg" (a Karate Kid reference) to remove spam. Maybe it's the same command for small projects based on the service. :-)
No, not the mentality that created a large website. The mentality that keeps people from creating ways to view the data that benefit the website's users. Craigslist won the market. Now it's time to open up.
If craigslist were solely out to monetize this website, that'd be fine. But they don't. They keep some things free and Craig has made a big deal about making money in the categories that needed a charge to prevent spamming. So there's a disconnect between a guy who wants to fight the "man" and someone who clearly just went out of his way to squash a bunch of little ones.
The correct moves in this situation for a top five website are:
- build the feature yourself. It sucks for the little guy who made his website but your users get the benefits anyway.
- don't build the feature because this feature is trivial and your users don't want it anyway. So this external website languishes and provides no benefit and no harm.
- buy the feature. Buy the company for a little money and implement the feature. The top 5 websites do this all the time. As an added bonus, you can acquire this talent who can create lots of great features for your users.
- hire the guys who made the feature and ask them to build it for you. They'd probably leap at the chance.
- Give the external website your blessing. Invest a little money in them so that if they strike it big you'll benefit.
- Make them pay a data access fee. Charge them per query.
Any of these would have been better options. This would be how a top five company should behave.
"The correct moves"? Hah. It's very easy to sit around armchair quarterbacking how you would run a site that gets about four orders of magnitude more traffic than the most successful thing you have ever created. (In fact, it appears to be something of a pastime among bored, underemployed web developers, cf. "You're Killing Me Zappos" or that one about the American Airlines web site.) I fail to see what authority you have to prescribe strategy to somebody who figured out a way to get 50 million unique visitors a month. Your assertions aside, there's not a shred of evidence that what you say is right, and that what Craig Newmark does is wrong.
I would hardly qualify as a bored, underemployed web developer, but I do believe there's a decent way to go about things. There is also some evidence that what Craig did was the wrong way to go about it.
1. Craig was having a discussion with Romy that was clearly misleading. The fact that there's been no further communication and pipes have been turned off demonstrates that.
2. All pipes were shut off. Even if you thought that Romy's pipe was commercial, some might not have been. Drowning everything might be easy, but it doesn't seem good.
3. He's on the board of the Wikimedia Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. These are both great organizations that advocate for openness, transparency, and the sharing of data. These groups would despise an action like this.
Craig has a right to run his business the way he wants to. However, there's a odd level of hypocrisy here and it merits being pointed out.
Craig has made it pretty clear in interviews that he likes the UI the way it is and wants it to stay that way. Reading interviews of Craig and Jim also make clear they attribute a lot of their success to intentionally not providing features. For better or for worse.
Why should he change it? The UI is simple and functional. There is no dancing bologna to distract you. Changing it just to make it comport with some layout pattern du jour would only disorient/piss off people who are accustomed to the way it is.
37signals, another company that seems to have a decent handle on how to get users, also believes that not providing features is part of why their apps work for so many people.
37signals also makes APIs available for developers who wish to create software that relies on their products. It's one thing to say, "Hey, most of our users wouldn't appreciate this feature, but go ahead and develop it for yourself" and another to shut you down mid conversation.
Craigslist nets tens of millions in profits each year, most of which I would assume ends up eventually in Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster's personal bank accounts.
I would guess they are operating under the principle of "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
It's very clear that their primary motivation is not money. It would be trivial for them to squeeze much more money from their service. Craig could also sell his company for more money than he could ever spend.
That's true, but they couldn't continue to run with the skeleton staff they currently do (30 people I believe). It would fundamentally change the nature of the business.
I agree with you that money is not the primary motivation, but I think the choice is more complex than simply opting in or out of potential revenue.
What sounds like a more likely explanation for them blocking yahoo pipes?
1) They make a lot of money and want to continue doing so, and feel threatened by third party services that disintermediate them.
2) Craig is "strange"
3) Craig is "evil"
There are of course other possible explanations:
4) Craigslist RSS server runs on a Pentium w/ 256MB of memory and can't scale
5) Someone at Yahoo stole Craig's girlfriend so he hates them.
I'm also pretty sure they only charge when the community begs for it (apartment listings in major cities, as a barrier to keep out spam) and are legally obligated (escort services, http://www.seattlepi.com/business/386655_craigslist07.html)
You guys. Get a grip. It's his company, he built it, you didn't. He makes the rules, you don't.
If you don't like that, then go build your own site that has the same level of success and define your own rules. And deal with all the people who tell you you are doing it wrong, that's a lot of fun.
For the record, I have no connection to craigslist other than admiring it. I'm flaming because I've got my own company and I deal with this crap as well and it's annoying. If you don't like the way someone else is doing it then either go do it better or shut the fuck up.
If someone is complaining about your service, it may be a good idea to listen to them. All of the "Blah, blah, if you want it you should be able to create your own super successful site" posts are really rather pointless. Yes, site/company owners have to make some tough decisions about their product, and how users can access/use it. There are going to be complaints, and there are going to be users who disagree. Telling your users to "shut the fuck up" when they're saying they disagree when you've gone from supporting them to destroying what they've built without telling them anything about it seems to be rather harsh.
Its easy to come out and say "Oh, he can do anything he wants because its his company, and if you don't like it just leave". It takes a hell of a lot more effort to actually put the finger on why a move like this (blocking an entire site which hosts various mashups, over 2000 targeting just Craigslist, without notifying the users or having any real method of notifying the "developers" why it was done, or what they can do about it) and trying to point out to the people who actually could do something about it.
As a tip, if you're getting that much flak from your users that you have to start flaming users on the internet about it, you're probably doing something wrong.
Thanks for the tip. The pointer to your successful site is? Sorry, cheap shot but...
And your claim that you or the other folks are a user is based on what? Craig takes care of the _actual_ users, the people who buy/sell stuff there, use it for job listings/postings, etc.
Your point about listening to your users would be valid if you actually were one. Or better yet represented a whole class of users.
The whining here comes from a set of people who are leaches. They are people who want to leverage craigslist.org. Whether it is for profit or for fun or for fame, it's leveraging the work of someone else. In no way are those people "users" of craigslist.
They're a monopolist with a bad product, like Microsoft, but they have a crunchy image so bay area hackers love them, despite the fact that they are freezing a whole sector of business in the dark ages (again, like Microsoft).
Everything you wrote could have been used as a defense of Windows 98, or IE 6. You may be defending a shitty user experience with a monopolist position, but we love you Craig because at least you hate capitalism.
As a long time user of craigslist I disagree with the "bad product" characterization. I find their website extremely pleasant to use, much like google. When will people learn that content is king and all that flash/image/whatever crud may look great but rarely does anything but distract from the actual content.
But rather than asserting that it is a fine product (which it is, though I agree it could be made better), how about spelling out what it is that you think would make it better? I wouldn't be surprised if Jim and/or Craig reads this thread at some point.
I was on the fence about Craigslist's minimalism. Then I tried Flippity's search of Craigslist's data (the service that Craigslist just killed for no reason) and realized that an equivalent Craigslist search would have took me about ten times as long, manually searching through all the ads.
This isn't simplicity. This isn't minimalism. This is Ludditism, backed by a monopoly position. How many millions of hours are wasted every day because of Newmark's anti-market fetish?
And Jim and Craig have made it abundantly clear in interviews that they don't care about user feedback, so I don't expect anything to change.
Something that wastes millions of hours per day and prevents anyone from replacing it with something better by virtue of its monopoly position and hostility to mash-ups? Yes, I can find the time to hate on it.
Probably not. Apple is a corporation that acts like one. They are in it to make money. They are better than average in that they try and make quality products (unlike cough Microsoft), but they are still very much in it to extract as much money as possible. And Apple has Jobs, the day that they derive any useful help out of the likes of me is the day I retire a wealthy man.
Craiglist is different, much less corporate in the traditional sense. From the very beginning they were trying to provide a service that is largely free (and hugely useful, I've bought and sold stuff there and never paid a tax like Ebay extracts). It's a pretty sweet setup, end users get a valuable service for free, craigslist gets money from entities that can afford to pay, why screw it up?
I tend to agree with some of the people here who want to make it better but if you really want to do that then go talk to them about a joint project or go work there. Personally, I'd love a way to search all of the craigslist sites at once (I shopped for months to get a 2006 Sprinter, wanted the smaller motor that gets better mpg, finally found one in portland. It was painful doing all those searches). So I agree that there are things that could be made better for the users of the site. I think the way you get those things done is to work with them from the beginning.
People here on HN often make comments about the dangers of building your business/app/service on top someone else's business/app/service (be it Twitter, FB, etc.).
If your app depends on Yahoo! Pipes AND Craigslist, well ... that's probably extra dangerous.
I know Craig personally, slightly, we've been on panels together. I also know Jim and Susan, been to their place in the city, hung out.
I'm old, 47, been in the valley for 20+ years. Seen a lot of shit, seen a lot of people get screwed over in stock options, seen the good and seen the bad.
What I'm trying to do is establish credibility (prolly didn't do a good job).
Whatever. You can listen or not.
Craig is good people. Really really good people. He cares, he does the right thing as much as he can do it. Craigslist could be at least 2 orders of magnitude more rich if they wanted to fuck you over. They haven't done that, they repeatedly try and take care of their users.
If you are unhappy with craig I pity you. Real life is going to fuck you.
It's hard to establish your credentials (account created 7 hours ago, just like your post).
Normally I would have looked through your previous comments/blog and tried to establish veracity of your claims. Freshness of account means thats not possible.
But in my mind there's two options
1) You're claims are not legit, you're a stooge
Shame on you.
2) You are legit, and you are mentioning your personal opinion
Thank you! It's nice to hear someone vouching for someone.
The HN startup community do it all the time. They just happen to be 20 somethings looking (rightly) to fit into the YC community.
I don't think you are appealing to authority as your comment will be judged on its own merits. Fuck those argument technicality Nazis anyway... you're not claiming to be a doctor, or the head of some company. Nor are you claiming to have special information that other people don't have... I'm sure lots of people have met this Craig (not me I'm in London) and could deny your view hiding behind screen_names.
I'll wait to see whether you continue to post to see if its 1) or 2). In case you are 2) please don't be discouraged by ignorant haters.
good point on the recent account creation, does make me look like a stooge.
It was/is my personal opinion and I'll try and stick around and establish a track record. I mostly don't do that sort of thing any more (used to be very active) because I got tired of all the armchair quarterbacks telling me I was doing it wrong. There are millions of them and only one of me :)
One slight quibble, I am the head of a (small) bay area software company. I'd kinda like to not be, I'm tired, but for now it is what it is. To all you folks who want to run your own thing my only advice is have fun along the way, spend time with your family, friends, whatever you like, but have fun. The time passes faster than you can imagine.
Anyway, thanks for the pleasant reply, I'll try and emulate your civil tone.
It hurts me when people chose to keep things broken (Craigslist) for irrational reasons, especially when it wastes hours of time for millions of people.
It seems to me that Craig is trying to balance making CL wide-openly available to individual people while preventing a business ecology from growing on top of it. He is all for the latter, and really hates the former. In contrast EBay thrives on the business ecology it has created. (But then I think Craig is a socialist at heart -- and bless him for it!)
So, while I am sorry that a bunch of cool hacks got shut down, it might be a pretty reasonable decision on CL's part to cut off Yahoo Pipes. Plus, it's his site to do with it what he wants...
(There is some great interview with him in Wired that got linked here not too long ago.)
It's broken because the people who go out of their way to create software for craigslist aren't largely duplicating functionality.
Want a map view so you can see all the relevant listings in one view?
Want craigslist to deliberately filter the same text or picture used for different listed apartments or jobs so you don't waste your time or get scammed?
Want to search by squarefoot or by actual bedrooms or by picture?
Apple would say "There's an app for that." Craigslist says "screw you".
Have you ever heard of the network effect? Craigslist has such a lock on its market that you would have to have something extremely compelling to dislodge them. A few flashy maps and a web 2.0ish appearance wouldn't be nearly enough to do it.
Classified sites gain a regional dominance. Craigslist in canada for example, is only really dominant in vancouver, one of their biggest foreign markets. Kijiji is dominant in other towns.
Many apartment/house finding sites have these features: search pages with dozens of checkboxes and dropdowns, and equally complex data entry pages for the people listing the apartments/houses. Yet Craigslist dominates. Simplicity wins.
How are these people a threat to Craigslist business? The more people use its data, the more valuable it becomes to post to Craigslist, and the more market share Craigslist gains. Craigslist does not lose a dime because of third-party mash-up sites.
Perhaps it's as simple as CL has no way of determining who is on the other side of the pipe. In Craig's quoted statement about RSS feeds, it seems that they are concerned about commercial use of CL data. If Yahoo Pipes essentially masks the origin of the request, then it makes CL's job more difficult.
As for determining motive -- profit or otherwise -- I suspect it's more about keeping others' greedy mitts off their community than cold cash. CL has been about the community of people using it since it was just a mailing list, and publicly Craig and Craigslist have been pretty clear about what they value. So, they probably see pipes as a threat to that community.
You know, I was playing with a couple scripts (mainly Markov chain implementation), that used Craigslist as a source for data. I got a good ways into it, and got a working model (I could generate text based on the handful of inputs I had set up for it). It wasn't until that point (I know, stupid) that I went back through all the ToS and realized I really couldn't do that.
Now, I know I might be able to get some where with them if I tried emailing them, and asked for the data I wanted. Then again, it sounds like I probably wouldn't. Either way, while the data was surprising well suited for what I wanted to do, it isn't really available, at least not in any way I could actually use it.
It makes me kind of sad every time I see someone do something like this. You've created something super cool, something with tons and tons of data. For what I was using it for (localized text samples), I can't think of a better, more complete place to find data from. But when you see something cool, something you never thought of/never thought was important enough to implement, and go out of your way to squash it, it makes the part of me that loves data feel bad about it. Craiglist has, at any given time, literally gigs of written text with all sorts of metadata on it. In the short bit I processed, I took all of the data from just a handful of boards, and ended up with over 150mb of data. Considering that most of that was <2 weeks old, They likely process up to a terabyte of data every year, with fairly good metadata on it. Seeing all of that only being used at face value seems like such a waste.
(As a side note, anyone with a bunch of written text samples, with information as to where each of them was written, I would really like to talk to you. Actually, that goes for anyone with any sizeable amount of data. Just because you don't see a use for it doesn't meant that there isn't someone out there who would absolutely love to get their hands on it.)
Back when I was running a service called Feed Digest (which I went on to sell - mostly due to the issue I'm raising here - now known as Feed Informer) this was a common problem. Not just with Craigslist, but with feeds from Google and all over the place. We wouldn't hit a single feed any more than once every 30 minutes but getting whitelisted everywhere was an exhausting task and ensuring you could always get the feeds for your users to reprocess was so difficult that I was heavily turned off of getting into a "man in the middle" situation like that again.
Maybe this isn't as reactive as you think. I noticed just in the last few days CL blocks any listing containing the string "bit.ly" (a net good for CL users). Try creating a post and you will get an error on the screen where you normally solve a captcha.
Maybe your correspondence coincided with a more general security tune-up they decided to roll out on Thanksgiving?
As a random datapoint:
Back when I used bloglines, I had subscribed to some searches with them, and after a few weeks, it stopped working. Craigslist seems to block anyone who hits a given rss feed much.
Craigslist has continued to thrive over at least ten years of neglect and hostility towards developers as well as interaction design. They seem to disprove your claim.
It is rather blunt to assume so. Nearly every week we discuss whether Google can be defeated. Yet, you think that Craigslist cannot?
My point is that their closeness will be major factor in their failure.
EDIT: I don't buy Craigslist hype. To me, their service is poor. Outside the US, especially in the East Europe, there's a lot of better alternatives. There was a lot of discussions why they succeed. I point out how they're likely to fail.
I think a big part of this is the misattribution of the .org label combined with overly simple design. People believe that craigslist is altruistic and trustworthy because it has given the appearance that it can only just keep the lights on and pay the bills. A real company could afford a logo designer!
So they've gotten huge (not in number of employees), but they're behaving just as arrogantly.
As others have pointed out, Craig's whole m.o. appears to be preventing people from building for-profit businesses on top of his site. Craig is anti-business. That's his prerogative. You obviously disagree with his philosophy, but a difference of opinion is not cause to go around calling somebody evil. He's done more good through his site and the $$ he generates off his site (which gets plowed into his foundation) than you, me and the next 100 people who read this combined.