> I'm an unabashed Craiglist hater simply because he completely fucked up and missed the boat and failed us developers by not transforming the most popular and best single Internet site of high signal/noise anonymous contact into the best open mashup API of real-time, localized, semantic data
Not only has CL failed to innovate, it actively goes after and shuts down third parties who do interesting things with CL data. :(
Notably section 3, "CONTENT," and the 2nd paragraph of section 14, "PROPRIETARY RIGHTS," in which they explicitly disclaim ownership: "Although craigslist does not claim ownership of content that its users post..."
If Craigslist actually stood by their community-centric, "everybody share" principles, rather than wear a fake mask of anti-corporatism over their money-grubbing true face, then Craigslist themselves would put a single checkbox on every Craigslist post form letting the user make that choice. And the default state of that checkbox would be "yes."
Then CL could just offer a bare-bones, REST, read-only firehose API to access those posts. Just like how Twitter does it. This entire project would probably take the developers at CL a month to roll out into prod. Hell, knowing how software shops work, they probably already have 3 private internal versions of it that were shelved by the ignorant, risk-averse management who only fear change and don't know how to tread water in the meandering river of technology and Internet society.
Wild idea for the Techcrunch rumor mill in 2011: it's too bad Twitter doesn't buy or merge with CL, and in absorbing CL, make them be more open and community-centric.
Perhaps CL will see the light and open up an API, as the newspapers get more desperate and turn up the dial on the hate. CL is going to need to show off something, anything to take the spot light off themselves before the wolves rush in now that they're injured & bleeding.
Oh you know know for sure that every user would want their data broadcast to 3rd party developers to do what they please with ... the way Facebook has done ... and oh by the way, how is that going for them?
Look, Craigslist doesn't want an api.
Its their software and its that simple
People need to get over it or ... you know ... go build their own classifieds listing service or something.
Not only has CL failed to innovate, it actively goes after and shuts down third parties who do interesting things with CL data. :(