It is important be wary of the foundation you build your business on. If you are building the core of your businesses around another company's API service you should be prepared to offer concrete value to that service's users in a way that doesn't directly compete with the main service, or do anything to directly or indirectly promote their competitors.
And, if you go against that approach you shouldn't be surprised or indignant when you get shut down. You will have a much better chance building a truly complimentary product, rather then rallying users to boycott a service or demand changes in policy.
To me it's sort of like someone who always drives over the speed limit by at least 50mph, and one day they finally get pulled over and are given a ticket. But, because they were never 'caught' before, they just feel like they were entitled to always drive that fast, and instead of just paying the ticket, they try to get the speed limit laws changed, or to have a judge throw out their ticket and let them keep driving however they want.
When you use another company's API, you are driving on someone else's road, and for better of worse you need to play by their rules.
So if you want to drive fast with no consequences, build your own road. And if your interested in 'exploiting' or piggybacking on someone else infrastructure, don't do something to call too much attention to your self.
PadMapper - started providing other listings that were not from craigslist.
GoodFilms - providing information and data to other movies services besides netflix
Pealk - were undercutting the price point for LinkedIN premium features.
thanks for that. PadMapper probably would have been fine if they remained craigslist only.
I was watching Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai last night. In it there are a number of Samurai codes that are highlighted in title cards. One of them was this:
"If one were to say in a word what the condition of being a samurai is, its basis lies first in seriously devoting one's body and soul to his master. Not to forget one's master is the most fundamental obligation for a retainer."
I am not shy to admit that I enjoy having pageviews (although I don't run ads). I could have done some better research and provided a deeper explication of my thoughts. I just saw a connection between three major 'API' controversies lately on HN, and wanted to share my initial thoughts to prompt healthy discussion.
This is the perennial frustration with the immense power of the network effect, a power that all start-ups live and die on.
Unfortunately, us humans have a hard time banding together and forming enough consensus to 'jump ship' enmass to a new service. Especially, when the a lack of 'innovative features' on a given service barely registers on the pain scale.
Look at the internets SOPA protest, the entire integrity of the internet was threatened and we did something about it. But how can you generate enough support around: we need better mash-ups to view craigslist postings!
You point is valid about the "but they have a right to do X". I think it does provide good discussion however.
My point wasn't so much that they have the right to do that, but more about when your playing with another company's API don't expect to disrupt them.
Choose a start-up that is already successfully and profitably using a company's API and make your service even better. AKA don't compete with the mothership.
It is frustrating that due to network effects, for-profit companies, gain a near monopoly on important data types. YouTube owns video, Craigslist owns classifieds, Netflix owns video viewing, etc.
It would be great if there was regulation over certain types of data that would require companies to post back to a central database if they take certain kinds of information. It would be great if there was a device that could help level the playing field.
The point of my post was to highlight that complaining, or being shocked by these companies behavoir is sort of missing the point.
How can we unify and provide access to what we feel to be 'universal' data types?
Until I came to visit the comments, I was convinced this could be a hoax/joke site.
"Wish you could spawn a human thread to help you?
If you have a task, small enough to delegate to someone, then this is it!" (Spawning humans!)
"Are you currently overworked, exhausted and have too much on your plate?" (Don't most people have too much on their plate?)
The site and its copy are vague and universal, which makes it funny, especially the 'Submit Problem' screen.
Only when I looked at the About Us page did I start to think this could be real.
However you also say "We find sites like stackoverflow very useful, but what if there was a middle term between them and small consultancy firms?"
You are basically trying to become a small consultancy firm it seems. Unless you let people sign-up and handle tasks themselves, like a crowdspring/99designs meets mechanical turk for programming.
How great would it be if Stumble Upon was pre-seeded with a ton of content automatically mined from your online behavior.
Manually curating a relevant stream of content requires alot of energy and effort. Right now, Facebook is the easiest, lowest effort source of content.
I imagine most Hacker News readers are pretty advanced when it comes to content discovery. But the average user is not as savy. By giving them a few tools, and a clear rules about how their behavior on facebook, (liking, sharing, reading, viewing, etc) contributes to the ads they are served, it could actually become a great resource that they pay attention to
I think you nailed it. My feeling is that if its not worth the time or consideration to send someone a email then why bother sharing it at all. The mindless broadcasting/signaling with no real intent seems cheap and not terribly interesting.
I see the value perhaps in Facebook as a a glorified catalog of your interests and liked content, as a canonical record of your browsing.
The content I like best in my Facebook news feed are links to content on the web.
There is this one girl I barely know, who regularly posts the coolest and most obscure old music videos from the 50s and 60s. To me she is the ideal Facebook friend.
Looking back, if I spent the same amount of time messaging and communicating with people that I spent building an app to facilitating future communication I would be much better off, thought more thoughts, and grown closer to more people.
(Also, thanks for keeping me honest with the "loose" typos, they've been corrected.
I gave up on keeping on tidy inbox long ago. I have 16,794 unread emails in my Gmail account. I feel like keeping my email organized would easily become a full time job.
In writing a comment on Sacha's blog, I came to the idea of deciding to offer a simple response to support incidents coming from the lowest paying tier. I wonder if anyone has done this and if you think it would work, or be a smart move?
Create a canned automatic response to someone submitting a request/support email that goes something like this.
"We have worked really hard to make this app/service as easy and intuitive to use as possible. On top of that we decided to price it very low to make it even easier and affordable for people to take advantage of. 80% of our paying customers never contact us for help or support. We honestly just don't have the time or resources available to explain how to use our service. If our help section and FAQs can't fix your problem, then you probably shouldn't be using this app, or we're gonna have to ask you to pay for support.
Option 1: Click here and we will immediately cancel your account and refund you.
Option 2: Click here to upgrade your account for support
Option 3: Figure it out!
Have a Nice Day!"
Or something like that. Perhaps it can written to be more friendly or in a more suitable tone. But you get the idea.