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.
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.