Thanks for all the suggestions; I'll take a look at them.
17 karma · joined March 26, 2008
So you need to make sure there isn't a copyright violation, which is going to depend on the specific information you're looking at.
There's still a potential problem, though, unrelated to copyright. After eBay v. Bidder's Edge, it can be trespass to chattels to scrape data in violation of a site's TOS. In the eBay case, the court held that it was in violation of trespass law because the eBay TOS prohibited robots... so it would have been fine if Bidder's Edge had taken the data manually.
Basically, you need to make sure the data isn't copyrighted, and you need to make sure that scraping the data isn't in violation of the site's TOS.
(it's nominally about running a manufacturing plant, but I think a lot of the takeaways apply just as well to startups)
1. Interface. Is there any way to rewrite it so that the user can just add tags naturally, and then let the program make suggestions? It's a bit frustrating to wait, after each term, for the program to search for the corresponding tag. If you could input your own tags, and then it could list an official suggestion beside each typed term, I think that might increase usability.
2. Very minor point, but the demo video should be easier to find. I could be alone in this, but I always try to poke around for one as the easiest way to quickly grasp a web app, and the link was buried at the bottom of the page.
Seems like a great app, though; the complete lack of structure for Delicious tags was always one of the things that stressed me about it.
"Go forth and complain!"