Robert MacManus write

Uber classifieds site craigslist has requested that Oodle, a classifieds ‘meta’ search engine, refrain from scraping its content.

Oodle did not understand why Craigslist is requesting this non-sense, but politely Oodle satisfied the request.

We are no longer adding new Craigslist listings to our index. […] We are working to understand and address their concerns. As of last month, about 80% of our listings came from sources other than Craigslist. Without them, we still have about 4.5M active classified listings and that number will continue to climb by the millions in the coming months. […] Oodle makes this process less painful and helps consumers to be more successful. And if you’re in the business of publishing classifieds, this is a good thing.

Oodle’s work is just to spider, index and show snippets of classified ads. It’s just a specialized search engine. Google could launch a similar service with not a lot of efforts (and there are rumours about this here and here). Google could have a scraping strategy (as they did for Google News) or redefine the whole market creating a new marketplace for classifieds. I don’t think that this can be avoided using lawyers.

This kind of lawsuits are terrible threats to our future. A future that could be as beautiful as suggested by this very interesting post by Henry Story in his Sun BabelFish Blog

By making your database available through a SPARQL end point you are allowing software engineers to create very powerful apps from your data that may in different ways help grow your business. This is what Web 2 is all about.

I feel this is the new battleground. It’s not about fair use, copyrights and other 19th century ideas. It’s about making sense of whole Internet.

Thanks to Jeff Jarvis, I found this remarkable article from Craig Newmark, the Craigslist founder, and his vision about customer services.