What happens when you take the ‘mash’ out of a mash-up? You get a mess up.
Oodle, a search engine for local classifieds was requested to stop scraping craigslist for listings. They of course did so, stating
We are no longer adding new Craigslist listings to our index. We received a request from them to do so and we honored that request.
They go on to write that this shouldn’t present a problem, since 80% of their listings come from other sources.
Based on that stat, this mash-up mess up isn’t too large but it does highlight a major problem with the mash-up model – relying on other people’s data. You have no guarantee it will be made available to you (like in Oodle’s case) or that it will always be free. I’m not familiar with an example for the latter of the two but imagine if Amazon, Google, craigslist, or others started charging even a nominal fee for access to their data. That would definitley change the face of the mash-up game.
