TechFold - Bold tech & web commentary

Bold tech & web commentary

TechFold is technology discussion, commentary, reviews, and opinions from well outside the valley. There's no koolaid to drink here, and TechFold is not in SL, or on Twitter.

Stranger and Stranger

Just a quick one on Amazon vs. Statsaholic. Extortion, criminal recods, litigation, pay-offs. Zoli and TechCrunch sum it up.

Who’s gaming who here? I find it hard to believe the Amazon, under media and shareholder scrutiny, with entire departments devoted to communication, litigation, and oversight, would try to blackmail Hornbaker into paying them an insignificant sum and handing over a domain. I just don’t believe such a decision could be made, especially when Amazon has legitimate legal avenues (in spades) to pursue in renegotiating their relationship with Statsaholic.

The alternative is that Hornbaker is playing Amazon in an elaborate PR game to get publicity for himself and Statsaholic. Everyone loves a david vs. goliath story, and Hornbaker is working hard to provide just that, deeping the depravity of Amazon’s behaviour on a regular basis and keeping everyone’s interest piqued. Is it anything more than base manipulation of public opinion?

Only time will tell.

Other posts here - the first calling out Amazon for being lame, the next starting to question the whole situation.

amazon, hornbaker, lawsuit, statsaholic techcrunch

What is the real story with Alexaholic/Statsaholic/Amazon?

The Alexa vs. Statsaholic story, in response to which I proposed a boycott of the Amazon eCommerce API, is getting complicated. Pete Cashmore has a petition on Mashable, calling on Amazon and Statsaholic to settle the dispute without litigation.

It emerged in comments however (see comments by James), that statsaholic was not using the Alexa API (which charges fees), but was instead scraping, or otherwise circumventing the API. James points readers to the Alexa Blog post on the topic in which Alexa takes issue with:

Trademark infringement via the “Alexa”holic name. Though Alexaholic has changed its name, Alexa points out that Statsaholic still redirects the Alexaholic domain to the new site - a remedy that is not satisfactory to Alexa. Personally, I think Alexa forfeited their rights to demand restitution from Statsaholic by allowing the use of the Alexaholic domain for years, and explicitly stating that they were aware of the Alexaholic, and supportive of it. Alexa should be content with the Statsaholic switch and call it a lesson learned on trademark protection.
Alexa also takes issue with Statsaholic’s use of graphs. The Alexa fee-based API (AWIS)does not include graphs - so statsaholic apparently (more-or-less) hotlinks them. This issue has the ring of legitimacy to it. The charts and the system to produce them consume resources, and the IP behind the charting system has value. If Statsaholic used paid AWIS data and their own charting engine, their wouldn’t be a problem. But it seems that Statsaholic is doing neither.

IN summary: (a) Statsaholic is entited to the Statsaholic name, and traffic from Alexaholic. (b) If Statsaholic is a viable business, it can afford to put out for its own chart rendering engine, and pay for use of AWIS data. To be honest, that sound preferable anyway - there’s a lot more opportunity to add value to data when you’re completely in control of presentation; and, that would give Statsaholic the opportunity to blend with data from other sources, creating a superior metric.

In any event, I don’t think Alexa needed to resort to litigation to get this ball rolling, but I don’t know both sides of the story. Pete C. suggests in response to James in comments that Alexa tried to up-charge Statsaholic, asking for more than the standard AWIS fees - is this substantiated?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, awis, mashable statsaholic

Boooo to Amazon - Suing Statsaholic: Amazon API/ECS Boycott time?

EDIT: HOW ABOUT MONDAY, APRIL 23rd FOR AN API ECS BOYCOTT? Post your thoughts in the comments. By “boycott” I mean if you use ECS to link to Amazon for affiliate sales, shut ‘er down and hit amazon in the wallet.

As a frequent user of the Amazon ECS API and follower of Amazon’s forays into platform-territory (S3, etc), I find it very disappointing to read about Amazon suing Statsaholic [Alexaholic] [via Mashable].

Mashable has the actual filing in their post, but the nub of it is that Statsaholic took Amazon’s open data and application platform and added value to it by offering an expanded feature set around Amazon’s offering, much like I did with the Flickr API and Google Maps on BlockRocker.com [flickr portion since removed], and much like many mashup artists have done thousands of times all over the net. I identified a gap in Flickr’s product offering and filled it, using their API. Flickr benefited, and so did I. When Flickr released their own geotagging product, I let the photo portion of BlockRocker die a slow death, eventually shuttered it, and that was that.

The same thing should have happened with Amazon and Statsaholic. Why Amazon feels the need to sue a niche business out of existence rather than thanking them for the adoption they’ve driven to this point and clobbering them with a superior product is anyone’s guess.

Perhaps the Amazon Mashup community should unite in solidarity against bullying of API-partners by having an Amazon shutdown day: I imagine if everyone using the Amazon API shuttered it for a day in protest, Amazon would feel some impact. I’ll Amazon links on UpcomingDiscs.com and HDDB.net - anyone else? What’s a good date?

alexa, alexaholic, amazon, blockrocker, boycott, flickr, mashable statsaholic