Mashups: who’s really in control? . . .

To put it bluntly, data owners hold the balance of power in this new world of Web mashups. Some data owners, like Google and Yahoo, provide formal APIs and are careful to explicitly define restrictions on what external developers may do with their data. Some data owners, like craigslist, don’t provide APIs and are more implicit and arbitrary about whom they allow to use their data.

Either way the fact remains that data owners can easily block off the air supply for mashups, either with a business decision (as in the craigslist-Oodle case), a policy update for an API, or by simply changing the data or technical rules around it.

So true. . . so true. . . another rarely mentioned point is that SEARCH ENGINES THEMSELVES ARE MASHUPS!. Search engines aggregate data (and meta data) around multiple sources to present information to users in an aggregated and controled manner. Take a look at froogle, its aggregating REVIEWS (how is that not data) from multiple sources and presenting it and manipulating it to the end user. So why are the search engines in control even if they dont own the data? Cause they own the traffic/attention. . . data owners can not stop the search engine from mashing up their data because they need the traffic. . . I’m sure everything Craig said was true, but he probably stopped Oodle because it was starting to send TOO MUCH traffic to craigslist that he need to stop it before the balance of power shifts from content owner to attention aggregator. . . when that happens, he could no longer shut them down without damaging Craiglist. . ..