Craig Newmark said on Quora that the reason they didn't like people building stuff on top of Craigslist was simply the extra bandwidth they consumed:

http://www.quora.com/Why-hasnt-anyone-built-any-products-on-...

But now that 3Taps has found an ingenious way to get at the data with zero extra bandwidth cost to Craigslist (by retrieving it from the Google cache rather than CL itself), it's clear that what Craigslist really dislikes is competition.

While Craigslist is probably within their legal rights here, this case shows that for all their talk about their benevolent aims, Craigslist is no different from other companies.

Okay, that's peachy. Here's the flipside:

--most people working in Amazon warehouses are employed by temporary staffing firms, not Amazon

--most people working in Amazon warehouses don't come anywhere near 3 years of tenure before quitting or being fired

--reimbursement is limited to $2,000/year for four years, while $5,000/year is pretty much the minimum direct cost to take such programs

--the program is limited to full-time workers, so only those who can take classes while working full-time and mandatory-or-you-get-fired overtime can partake

The number of warehouse workers eligible for this is nearly zero. Might even be precisely zero.

The tone in this article is unbelievable.

>The case raises questions over whether Craigslist is stifling innovation or simply protecting its data

There is no question. Craigslist isn't stopping Padmapper from being built, its stopping Padmapper from using Craigslist data. The continuous attempts to reframe Craigslist's actions as an attempt to stifle innovation seem almost surreal. I just can't understand how a community of professionals could support Padmapper in this.

It's remarkably close to what I'd write today. The biggest difference now is the numbers. Now on a typical weekday we get about 150k unique IPs and 1.5m pageviews.