Do You Get To Pick Your Own Community Online?

from the seems-odd dept

While there's been all this talk lately about online openness and connecting different offerings around a larger "community" (which is yes, both overhyped and misleading), it appears that one of the biggest and earliest "community" plays wants no part of it all. Earlier this year we wrote about Craigslist's decision to block out someone who created a multi-location Craigslist search. Recently, Craigslist got attention again for blocking out classified aggregator Oodle from scraping and linking to their posts. Craigslist is trying to explain the situation away by saying that it was really the users at Craigslist themselves who were upset about Oodle scraping Craigslist items. Of course, what's weird is that there are plenty of other sites that also scrape Craigslist, including Google, and they don't seem to be complaining about those sites. What does come across, instead, is that Craigslist believes the "community" is on their site only -- and they really just don't care to participate in any wider community. It's an odd closed view that most people wouldn't have associated with Craigslist in the past. While Craigslist obviously has the right to do whatever they want, it's hard to see how these moves benefit them at all. It just makes them look like they don't play well with others.