

How Yahoo's Latest Acquisition Stole & Broke My Heart - aditya
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/when.php

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nowarninglabel
>"It turns out the client at the end of the long pipeline of invoices sold a
diet pill, and young women were complaining on MySpace and forums that the
pill sometimes caused leakage from their..."

So you thought cause you were a consultant that it didn't matter that you were
aggregating people's personal posts from MySpace for the purposes of Big
Pharma? Surely, we must draw the ethical line somewhere.

~~~
marshallk
Well, it was aggregating complaints of side-effects, which is a good thing for
the pharma company to keep track of if they're going to sell such a drug. But
yeah, that's why I felt uncomfortable about working with them, didn't continue
and now joke about it publicly. Plus it's odd.

------
andrewljohnson
A company called "Fetch" is very similar to Dapper. Their tech is used to
aggregate things like Dow Jones news stories.

They monetized by selling licenses to use their scraper. I wonder why Dapper
couldn't do the same?

<http://www.fetch.com/>

------
bluesnowmonkey
> It was beautiful, but people didn't want it, they didn't understand it.
> Because people are stupid.

I watched his video explaining Dapper and could only loosely follow what he
was doing. It was clear that he was making an RSS feed of changes to a web
page, but the process of selecting the dynamic elements of the target page was
unclear to me. And several times he had to say things like, "Oh, it's confused
now. We'll just fix that..."

So maybe you came to the right conclusion that _the rest of the world is
stupid._ Or maybe Dapper was a little difficult to use, and the value
proposition was a little vague, and it never really took off. Thousands of
cool projects have met the same fate. That's just it goes.

Keep your chin up. At least you got a cool sweatshirt.

------
danielnicollet
anyone knows of something equivalent to Dapper out there? I really wish there
was since I need this for a project. Thanks!

~~~
hartror
Pythoneers have BeautifulSoup, it is fast simple and can deal with real world
html. I have used it for site scraping with great success.

~~~
Luyt
lxml.html does a pretty good job too, and offers elementtree and xpath
querying. <http://codespeak.net/lxml/lxmlhtml.html>

Recently I used Beautiful Soup in a very simple program to scrape playlists
from Soma.fm: <http://www.michielovertoom.com/hobby/somafm-playlists/>

------
aditya
_Enjoy it while you can, until an uncaring market starves it to death and it
turns into an ad network, for lack of viable alternatives._

Depressing as that is, perhaps the future holds promise. As the cost of
building startups keeps trending down, maybe timing will stop mattering as
much, and business model innovation (such as freemium) will save good
technology from turning into ad networks?

Isn't this part of the skill required to build a successful business anyway,
your technology is only as good as the people selling it. Where would google
be, if they hadn't hit on AdSense?

------
lanstein
Fun fact: Jon is the person who told me about HN in the first place.

