willu

"There is nothing (law, morals, or else) that prevents one from scraping a publicly accessible website."

Can you point to any legal precedent that supports your contention (honest question)?

I am a fan of ProductHunt and look forward to their emails. BUT I do have to gripe a bit about the current very limited, "exclusive" commenting system. I want to get real insights from people who have used the product/service being featured and instead it's usually just the guy who runs ProductHunt plus maybe one other friend or colleague who takes a couple of minutes to poke around providing pretty shallow feedback...and it's very rarely critical. Then an investor in the featured site/product chimes in about how awesome the team is. Not a lot of value there. Both consumers and founders would benefit from more openness.

I was actually pretty excited about this because they happen to have a lot of music I listen to (electronic). I loaded up about two dozen albums and downloaded their Android MP3 app. Tried to play a track and was told the track was no longer Prime eligible. The whole album grayed out and when accessed says "We're sorry but this album is no longer available in Amazon's catalog".

FWIW, they do have Tycho...

http://www.amazon.com/Awake-Tycho/dp/B00FSU5OFS/

This is basically the BloomReach approach to SEO and Google seems to be going after it in a serious way lately. The big issue is quality control. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to create these sorts of landing pages if they surface highly relevant results. Google's product search is not comprehensive or sophisticated enough yet to be useful for the common shopper so it's a mistake to penalize highly refined results with no good replacement.

In some regards I agree. The rules are constantly shifting and they are unevenly enforced in a way that favors large, established sites which is frustrating for smaller players. Good examples here: http://nenadseo.com/big-dogs/ At least the person mentioned in this article received an unnatural link notice. In other cases Google will just sink your site into oblivion overnight with no explanation or recourse.

At the same time, they have to deal with an entire industry that exists to exploit the very metrics they rely on to rank results so I don't blame them for just saying screw it, let's just float up our own content and well-known brands for every search and call it a day.

"In late 2005 it acquired NetNewsWire and hired me." "I shipped NetNewsWire Lite 4.0 on the Mac App Store, and a couple months later sold NetNewsWire to Black Pixel..."

How do you sell a product after it has been acquired by another company? Did he somehow retain independent ownership of the Lite version?

So GoogleBot can't scrape more than 10 NYT articles per month, right?

I've wondered this as well. The market seems really limited - people who are savvy enough to know about/use Aereo but are content with occasionally watching just a handful of broadcast networks...who aren't really producing the shows savvy people are buzzing about these days. Aereo's legal bills must be insane and the infrastructure looks expensive since everything is custom. Even if they win in the courts, what additional doors does that open up? It's not like cable networks will suddenly want to get in bed with them.

It was pretty straightforward in our case. We had to show them that we had use cases that weren't feasible with the default access level and also demonstrate that we weren't competing with their user experience at all. Not sure how much it mattered but we had been using their streaming API for almost as long as it existed.

Yes, Twitter streaming API plus several other data sources (Facebook, Reddit, forums, etc.). It's enough for us since we're always filtering by keywords or users. We were also granted elevated access.

Interesting, I had gotten the impression Twitter was aligning itself more with DataSift in recent years. I used Gnip a few years ago and thought it was a great service, although the high price point drove us to ultimately roll our own.