The latest from TechCrunch
- Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes After Dev Shows Craig His New Mashup
- Inbox2: One InBox And Communications Stream To Rule Them All
- Genieo Raises $3 Million For Personalized Homepage Platform
| Craigslist Blocks Yahoo Pipes After Dev Shows Craig His New Mashup | Top |
| Developers take note: if you’ve got a mashup built off of Craigslist’s data, don’t even think about showing it to anyone who works there. At least, that’s the lesson learned by developer Romy Maxwell, who says that Craigslist has blocked both his mashup and every single project built on Yahoo Pipes a few days after a friendly Email exchange he had with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark . Maxwell is one of the developers behind a new mashup called Flippity , which lets you plot Craigslist listings on a map. In a blog post, Maxwell writes that he had been having an Email exchange with Newmark over the last few weeks, during which Maxwell asked if the techniques employed by his project would be acceptable under Craigslist’s restrictive Terms of Use. Newmark replied that “ as a rule of thumb, [it's] okay to use RSS feeds for noncommercial purposes. ” Since the project used RSS feeds and was non-commercial, that seemed to indicate that the project would be OK. Maxwell followed up by asking if he was allowed to ask for donations on the site, which Newmark said he would look into. A couple weeks later, Maxwell sent Newmark a link to a working alpha version of Flippity. Newmark went silent, Craigslist pulled the plug on Flippity and every other Yahoo Pipes project soon thereafter. From Maxwell’s blog: I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw what Craigslist had done. They literally added a check for “pipes.yahoo.com” in the referrer header of any HTTP request, which was then redirected to the home page. In essence, they blocked them. Really, Craig ? This is your response ? To be clear, Maxwell says that his post isn’t meant to be an attack on Newmark himself. Newmark actually CC’d a customer service representative on a couple of messages during the exchange, so it’s possible that they were the ones who ultimately decided to shut down Flippity and all of Yahoo Pipes. Maxwell writes in his blog that he and another developer have been building the mashup for 2 months. The goal was to build something that would plot Craigslist listings on a map, offering an easy way to see what goods are being sold in your proximity. There’s already a great mashup called PadMapper that does this for housing, but Flippity was supposed to work for any Craigslist listing. For details on how the mashup worked, check out this post . Of course, this isn’t really anything new for Craigslist. The site has previously shut down mashups using its data many times before. But they have permitted some sites, like Housingmaps, to tap into Craigslist data for years. And it seems strange that they would ban all Yahoo Pipes apps in response to this. Maxwell says that this doesn’t mark the end of Flippity: the site will adapt to use another source of data, like eBay or Oodle. We’ve reached out to Craigslist for comment and will update if we hear back. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Inbox2: One InBox And Communications Stream To Rule Them All | Top |
| Mirror, mirror on the wall, which inbox is the fairest of them all? Inbox2 is betting on all of them with its online platform, which attempts to bring together all your message streams (email accounts, Twitter, Facebook) into a single master inbox. Today, recently launched Netherlands-based InBox2 is launching a host of new features to its offerings. InBox2 offers both a web application and a Facebook application that will integrate your email messages and Twitter stream into the social network. The web app can configure to multiple email accounts (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and AOL) and presents various ways to see your streams broken down by service, contact, thread or within one powerful stream. You can send, reply and search in one place. One of the key features for Inbox2’s web app and Facebook app is the ability to send Facebook messages or Twitter DMs and replies from within the apps. When using the Facebook app, the service will notify users if they receive new email or status update from any of their configured accounts. InBox2 also allows the use of smart labels and stars for messages and attachments and you can import your existing labels from other services such as Gmail. The apps now allow users to share and attache email, documents and images directly from your Inbox2 stream or Facebook app. The app has also added realtime updates from Twitter, Facebook and now Yammer and LinkedIn. You can also create and save searches on Twitter. And the app now supports Microsoft Exchange 2007. InBox2 is best compared to TechCrunch 50 finalist Threadsy, which debuted its all-in-one, web-based communications client a few months ago and received positive reviews from the judges and audience. The main difference is that Threadsy doesn’t have a Facebook app. Inbox2 is planning to roll out an iPhone app soon and is also looking to launch offerings for other smartphones in the near future. Not only is Inbox2 a useful service for consolidating communications, but it is visually appealing and easy to filter out the stream. Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Genieo Raises $3 Million For Personalized Homepage Platform | Top |
| Startup Genieo, which develops personalized home pages, has raised $3 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors. Genieo’s technology automatically discovers the user's topics of interest when they are browsing and generates a personal home-page with relevant content and personalized news widgets. A desktop application, Genieo maps and profiles user behavior on computers to determine what content to add to a user’s hompage. Content that is integrated into Genieo’s homepages include favorite websites,news/blog updates, Facebook status updates and Twitter Streams, a Google search bar, videos, and more. It’s a little scary for a program to be profiling a user’s behavior on private sites where you might not want a third party be viewing information, but Genieo assures users that it does not collect or share any private information. The startup faces competition from NetVibes and iGoogle. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
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